If It Were to Remain
by CBK1000
Summary: Immortality is a tricky thing, in this city. 6th in an ongoing AU Originals series. Klaroline
1. Part One

**A/N: If you follow my tumblr, you're already aware of what I'm about to say, so you can go ahead and skip this part of the note, unless you for some reason enjoy watching me blather along. What happened with this one-shot is this: I happened to check my word count as I was blundering along, realized that I had already written an average-length one-shot (excluding, of course, the beast that was No Sooner the Old Hope), and thought, "Ah, fuck; how did that happen? I still have quite a bit of plot to go." Due to this fact, and also because it's been a bit since I updated this series, I decided to go ahead and split this one-shot into two parts the way I did with No Sooner. It won't be as long as that monstrosity, but this will still divide it into more manageable chunks, and also give you guys a shot of Klaroline feels that you are probably sorely missing, with them currently on separate shows. So keep this on your alerts if you'd like to read the second part.**

**I'd also like to add that I am not watching The Originals, so you're probably not going to see much (or likely any) incorporation of canon now that the show's started. I'm not going to list all my grievances with the show, but suffice it to say that there is much more that I don't like than I do, from the spoilers and gifsets and video clips I have seen on tumblr. If you're wanting something canon-compliant, you're just going to have to look elsewhere. If a flashback strikes my fancy, I may incorporate it into my timeline and refer to it, but likely this series is just going to keep going entirely my own direction, particularly since I already have an overarching storyline laid out in my head that's not likely to shift much. I assume since this is AU you guys weren't expecting too much canon, but I just wanted to make that clear in case someone was expecting to start seeing storylines from the show pop up in this.**

**These quotes: 'Time doesn't matter, this book asserted. Certain moments go on forever. Even after they're over they still go on, even after you're dead and buried, those moments are lasting still, backward and forward, on into infinity' are from _Before I Fall _by Lauren Oliver. The poem is 'By the Arno' by Oscar Wilde.**

**All right, that's enough chattering for now. Off we go. I hope you enjoy.  
**

* * *

In the nineteenth year there is a sort of uncertainty, a hovering on the brink. High school done, college just begun, more years before than behind, life stretched on into eons, but what to _do _with your adult passions and your child fears; how to _unravel _these great mysteries of time and what the hell you're going to do with it and how not to waste it.

It's another tiny little step forward.

Not so great a stride as twenty-one, forty, sixty, all these monumental markers of adulthood, middle-age, the powdery geriatric years with their crepe paper fingers and their soft hunchback bones, but still a step, a pace, forward _movement_, a place to go, a direction to walk.

But for someone like her there are no more steps.

On her seventeenth year she breathed her last few inhales and she inched forward her final few steps and then she froze.

Aging is a waylay.

You check your mirror each morning, casually or critically, you linger or you glance, and for years you go on doing this, frowning at a zit here, plucking a hair there, and this face is just so _familiar_, it's never going to change, it's always going to be _you _with your full lips and your eyes too far apart and your eyebrows just a little askew.

And then one morning you wake up and you spot the first fracturing, this little spider web of maturation crinkling eye, lip, brow.

God when did this _happen_, you want to know; how many candles do you have left on your cake; when does the hourglass sift its final grains; which breath is your last, which meal your final- how could these years have passed in such a flurry and crushed you beneath their weight-

But she will wake up to her twentieth birthday with her seventeen-year-old cheeks, and for the next two hundred birthdays she will go on doing this, finding no grays, discovering no lines, painting eyelashes which have not gone to snow and lids that have not folded into pleats, and this just sounds so great, right- no final blackness, no guillotine over the neck, no freaking _end_- you can go on as long as you _want_-

But this morning she woke up and she rolled over to check all the messages on her phone, and do you want to know how many she had?

Two.

Happy Birthday, Care.

Love, Matt.

Happy Birthday Caroline.

Stefan.

She had this friend once.

She held her when Mom couldn't be there and she stepped in when Matt wasn't enough and she promised her always, and maybe back then it didn't mean the same thing it does now, but _always_- that's an eternal promise, and maybe her eternity is just a little longer than she expected, but that doesn't mean you can just _drop it_-

But here's what happened, see.

This friend got up one morning just like her and maybe she too looked into her mirror and she smiled her today-it's-going-to-be-fine smile, and then she went forth into the world, and she did not come back.

You don't…you don't _understand _until they're gone how hard a missed text is going to hit, how deep an empty call list is going to cut, the way each breath you take will for so long remind you that underneath six feet of grave rot they get _nothing_ because someone handed them the shit end of the deal.

Eighteen _years_, Bon, God, how is that _fair_- maybe you weren't going to hold her kids or watch her walk down the aisle but she was going to be there for every one of these human milestones, and yes, she understands that one day she was going to lose you to some human frailty, that eventually she was going to have to do without, but not until you had a _chance_, not until you got a _life_, Bonnie-

Why is it always too soon? This man gets eighty-five, that woman has twenty-nine- who _decides_? In all humankind are there countdowns that click incessantly away toward the conclusion? When a baby slips out stillborn between his mother's legs, when a girl wakes up with a smile and slumps over with a cry- are these freakish flaws, a jam in the cogs, or hardwired fate, predetermined destinies?

Couldn't she have…couldn't she have _done _something?

She sits in front of this mirror with its seventeen-year-old girl and she sobs without sound because Mom wants to know how she is doing and what she plans to do today and she can't not be ok for this woman who maybe wasn't there enough, who worked too late and who understood too little, but who loved her still, who never let her go.

She squares her shoulders.

She tries to smile, watches it crumple.

"I'm going out with some friends, mom. Taking a break from studying for the day," she says steadily.

"Well have fun, sweetie. Be careful. I wish you were coming home."

"Me too," she just barely gets out. "I miss you, mom. Love you."

Mommy, she doesn't say.

Today she is seventeen.

Today she is seventeen and she will never stop _being _seventeen, but her friends- her _friends_, Mom.

They're never going to keep up.

She hangs up her phone and shuffles blindly into the little living room suite between door and bedroom, and sitting on one of the couches is something she didn't even notice on her way into the bathroom.

"Seriously? Creepy much?" she says out loud, wiping her eyes.

No fancy jewelry this time, in the little velvet-lined case he has left for her.

The oleander on the wall

Grows crimson in the dawning light,

Though the grey shadows of the night

Lie yet on Florence like a pall.

The dew is bright upon the hill,

And bright the blossoms overhead,

But ah! the grasshoppers have fled,

The little Attic song is still.

Only the leaves are gently stirred

By the soft breathing of the gale,

And in the almond-scented vale

The lonely nightingale is heard.

The day will make thee silent soon,

O nightingale sing on for love!

While yet upon the shadowy grove

Splinter the arrows of the moon.

Before across the silent lawn

In sea-green vest the morning steals,

And to love's frightened eyes reveals

The long white fingers of the dawn.

Fast climbing up the eastern sky

To grasp and slay the shuddering night,

All careless of my heart's delight,

Or if the nightingale should die.

Something slithers out onto the floor and lands with a soft rustling on the carpet between her toes as she gradually unrolls this note with its ridiculously perfect handwriting.

Ok, never mind. Poetry _and _jewels- isn't somebody just whipping out their Victorian Gentleman with a vengeance.

She leans over to retrieve it, and what she comes up holding is the bracelet she threw back in his face once a very long year ago.

For a moment she can only stand staring down at it.

Her eyes are still hot, her throat stoppered, but there's this tiny little kindling way down deep in her chest, and up it spreads, out it goes, and now suddenly this smile she tried so hard to fake is here for real.

Just a tiny little thing, she sees in the mirror she passes on her way back into the bedroom.

But aren't all the best beginnings merely a ripple?

* * *

In her bathroom she faces that mirror once again, and today she puts on makeup just for her, today she lines her eyes and she darkens her lips just _because_.

Today she is nineteen.

Today she is nineteen and she still has so far to go, years to tread, decades to put away behind her, and maybe she has already lost so much and perhaps she has so much more to forfeit, but for just this one brief day that will be buried among all the layers to come, she is going to take a pause, inhale a breath, worry about neither Salvatore drama nor Mystic Falls crisis, concern herself finally with her, just _her _and how she feels and what she wants and whether it's all really _ok_.

And it just so happens that she is going to look fanfreakingtabulous, power-walking the city, and this too is just for her, just because she likes what she sees, when she looks in this mirror and she spots eyes that are not too far apart and lips just the right shape.

* * *

He comes home to an empty house.

It's hardly a surprise -Bekah is still a touch put out with him- but still there is a little prickle way down inside him, opening the door on a tomb.

He takes the stairs two at a time, shaking the rain from his hair as he goes.

In his room there is a whiff of this perfume she recently changed, and he freezes in the doorway.

Propped up on his pillow is a note, neatly handwritten, the ink just slightly smeared, the page scented with this same aroma he breathes in and he holds so tightly inside his lungs.

He crosses the room to lift it carefully from the bed, unfolding its corners cautiously, handling these storm-smudged words so gingerly.

_So the bracelet- your lame-ass idea of an apology, right? I was thinking really big diamonds. (I'm JOKING. Do NOT show up on my doorstep with, like, the Heart of the Ocean.)_

_ But definitely think really hard about all the ways you can spoil me, because if I can still hold a grudge against Heather Rice for ripping the arms off one of my dolls way back when we were five, just IMAGINE what I can do with another thousand years._

_P.S. I'll know if you touch my files._

_P.P.S. And I will end you._

_ P.P.P.S. I'm serious, Klaus. Not a single gajillion-year-old finger. _

_ Fondly,_

_ Caroline_

_ (I was totally going to sign this Xoxo -C, but I knew that particular pop culture reference would go right over your bajillion-year-old head. I figured this one at least you'd probably recognize.)_

It is no love letter.

She has penned no fawning confessions, no florid declarations.

But still he smiles so hard as he reads it, and when at last he sets it aside he looks to the frame above his bed, and he hops up onto his mattress to slip from this glass memorial his favorite of all his victims' missives, and he replaces it with hers.

* * *

She takes herself out for one lunch, two desserts, darts across St. Charles to duck into Kenneth's for a trim and a blow-dry, prowls carefully around beneath the awning-covered shops until she spots one offering up umbrellas to its bedraggled customers.

Inside the Serenity Nail Spa she shakes out this umbrella, folds it down, offers the receptionist her bestest brightest smile, because of _course _she doesn't need an appointment- today it's her birthday, she is nineteen, and everything is going to be _fabulous_.

She's decided.

No creepy Damon, no tortured Stefan, no friends who did not love her enough and boys who forgot how to stay, just her and this fantastic new dress that emphasizes her boobs just freaking right and that seriously flawless shade of red you have over there on that footstool.

The receptionist takes her coat with a smile and the manicurist whisks her away with a friendly hand on her arm, and on down the row she is taken, to the last chair on the right, and now from the seat just beside it there is an indignant huff, a shifting about on the leather.

"You've got to be joking."

"Ok, _please_- like I planned this?"

"I wouldn't put it past you. All royalty have their little hangers-on." Rebekah smiles nastily.

"Are you two together?" the manicurist asks. "We do girlfriend packages for a discount-"

"_No_," they snap in unison.

She takes her seat, slipping off her heels.

"Excuse me- I'd like this woman moved to a different chair."

"Maybe all the blonde is just obscuring your vision, but in case you hadn't noticed, there _are _no other chairs."

"Then I'd like this woman escorted out."

"I am not going anywhere, your Royal _Bitch_. It's my birthday. And this is my first day off from people trying to kill me or eat me or ruin _my _freaking party with all their totally unrelated personal drama in _years_. So I'm going to sit here, and I'm going to get a manicure _and _a pedicure -sweetie, don't pay attention to her, she's just being a thousand-year-old toddler- and if you don't like it, then we will all gladly watch while the door hits you in the butt on your way out it."

"Oh your birthday- how precious. What did Nik get you? One of his kidneys?" She cocks her head as the woman kneeling at her feet carefully dabs on a layer of pink. "I don't like that one. Re-do it. Let's try the next shade up this time."

Caroline flutters her eyelashes innocently. "Maybe I can't talk about what he got me. You know, a girl doesn't kiss and tell and all that."

"Please, Caroline. Just because this woman is making minimum wage doesn't mean she deserves to have her head vomited on, so let's just skip right on past mental images I could do without. I have a delicate constitution, and I can almost smell the barnyard animals from here."

"Excuse me?"

"You know- where all sovereigns take their little tumbles with the peasantry? In the hay, where they belong."

She snorts indelicately, folds her hands together in her lap, lets the nail tech prop her foot up on her thigh. "Except we did it in your gajillion dollar mansion. On everything." She scrunches up her nose and shoots Rebekah her brightest Miss Mystic smile. "Hope you didn't want to use any of your furniture ever again."

"Don't think that just because my brother is harboring some little crush on you that I won't rip out your heart."

"I think I'm probably ok. I mean, then you'd have to get your hands dirty, right? And from what I remember about your work ethic, you like to swoop in when everything is pretty much already decided, take over at the last minute, and then try and hog all the credit for yourself."

Rebekah leans forward with a scowl, her hair grazing the back of the woman buffing her heels, brow furrowed, lips sewn together tight. "Excuse me, but if I recall, wasn't it _I _who cleaned up after a bloody dance I didn't even get to attend?"

"Ok, boo freaking _hoo_. You were probably off eating grandmas. Or girls with better hair than yours."

"Well it definitely wasn't the second. Non-existent victim pool." She smiles. "But you wouldn't know about that."

For a moment they can only sit glaring at one another, the chattering of the spa all around them, their techs studiously tuning out this awkward little exchange, painting and filing and buffing in silence.

"You didn't think that just because you managed to convince my brother to not keep me in a box for the next ten lifetimes that I would spend a moment of my time being grateful to you."

She looks up from her toenails.

Outside the rain hammers, roars, pounds the street to oil and mud.

She listens to the clicking of the tech's clippers, the broom whisking of the nail brush, the soft cinnamon exhales of the woman working away at her feet.

"What would make you think that I had anything to do with it?"

Rebekah snorts and looks away. "Please. You don't think I really believe that Nik, in the height of one of his temper tantrums, out of the goodness of his heart just randomly decided to let me go, to not teach me a lesson? Someone talked him round. And the only person capable of getting through that impossibly thick skull of his is you, Caroline." Her hand flexes on the arm rest of her chair, tenses, flattens back out with an effort, curls once more into the leather. "But you can forget us all living together as one big happy family. In fact, take him- run away with him. What do I care? I've stayed by his side for centuries, protected him, _loved _him, made sure that when there was no one else to take up his cause, when no one else cared to put themselves in his corner, he at least had me, that he would never _not _have me, and who gets through to him? Who will he do anything for- who inspires mercy and forgiveness in him? Some cheap little blonde in a cheerleader skirt who in a few years will have moved on to her next flavor of the decade."

Rebekah lifts her foot up out of the grip of the tech layering on her final coat. "You're done. And don't expect a tip, or my further patronage of this particular establishment; it looks like a finger painting." She grabs her purse from the floor beside her chair as she stands, slips on her flat-heeled sandals, slings her bag up over her shoulder with a cool little smile. "Happy birthday, Caroline. Try not to get viciously murdered. Nik is a lot more fragile than he likes to pretend."

She smiles again and she lifts her chin and she leaves her pedicurist gaping incredulously after her.

* * *

She spends an hour nursing a chai latte in a café just down the road, scrolling through old videos and pictures, smiling as she goes, pausing on Elena's warm smile, Bonnie's infectious laugh, her drunken dancing.

Eternity -years innumerable, experiences incalculable- this is what you are promised, when you lie down a girl and you wake up a corpse.

But still you don't know, you can never predict.

350 to Lexi, a thousand to Kol and to Finn, Rose dead in 560.

How many is she going to get; has Bonnie preceded her into her bed of moss and mold by only a few scant years; will she make it through, can she dodge them all- does she want to _keep going_, when so many beside her cannot come along for the ride?

She hits play.

She listens to Bonnie's voice, sieved through speaker, filtered through fuzz.

And here we are on the set of Romeo and Juliet with our very own Juliet, the buxom, the beautiful, the fabulously talented Caroline Forbes, she crows.

Give us an interview, Miss Forbes. What does your career hold next; any upcoming projects you can divulge; is there any truth to the rumors that Brad Pitt left his wife and risked his entire career just for one night in your arms, she demands so seriously, and then comes the first fracture, the tiniest webbing of wrinkles around her eyes, and now Bonnie flips the phone around to capture in jerky starts and stops her own face, painted for the stage.

Bon.

She doesn't-

She's still not sure how to be _ok _with this -that she has to _preserve _you- _why _and when is it going to stop hurting and will she ever be _over _it- how many more _times _is this going to happen-

She read this book once.

Time doesn't matter, this book asserted.

Certain moments go on forever.

Even after they're over they still go on, even after you're dead and buried, those moments are lasting still, backward and forward, on into infinity.

But this book was penned by a mortal hand and she read it with mortal eyes and what she did not understand then was how _fragile _time is, how you can simultaneously have too much and too little of it, how one moment you have a friend and the next you do not; magical talent, supernatural skill, it doesn't _matter_, to dust you too one day will return, and _screw _your eternal moments, they do not exist, there is no such thing; like humans, civilizations, entire species, all moments pass, and they cannot be rewound, you cannot have them _back_.

This girl is now just some pixels on a screen.

This moment of beaming smiles, girlish giggles, bustling set- it passed long ago and just because it is still here in her hand does not mean she has grasped it tight, it does not mean she has held _on_; because Bonnie persists still in this 324x352 sarcophagus she has not lost her- that gravesite moment she was too blind to see never happened, _no_- _no _god_dammit_-

She puts her phone down and she folds her hands together, and she looks out through the window, into the rain.

Mere mortal, timeless supernatural- you grab what you can and you do not let go.

She'll see you again one day, Bon.

But until then, she thinks…she thinks she's going to live for herself, for just as long as she can.

She hopes you understand.

* * *

He listens to the door shut far away downstairs, and shifts one of the papers on his desk.

He does not look up from his work. "Well, look who's decided to return at last. Any casualties, Bekah?"

He recognizes her perfume before she is halfway up the stairs.

She steps quietly into his office with her coat thrown over her arm and his bracelet on her wrist, and for a moment she pauses.

He tips himself back in his chair and he folds his hands beneath his chin and he does not breathe.

"Hi," she says.

He smiles as he always does upon first seeing her, involuntarily, powerlessly, and though she has always touched off a jolt inside him, this little lurch is suddenly a bolt and now down through his fingers, his gut, his feet it sizzles, because what he gets in return is not her derision but her _smile_.

How bloody _bright _it is, this thing he could soak himself in for another century.

"So I've been kind of doing my own thing today, you know, jet-setting around the city and all, but a girl doesn't want to be alone for her whole birthday, even if her alternative is some guy who breaks into her room while she's sleeping to deliver his presents. Seriously, do you ever think about maybe just mailing your gifts?"

"Now that's a bit impersonal, don't you think?"

"_Huge _gift-giving faux pas. Right up there with re-gifting to the same person who originally bought you the gift," she agrees, arching one eyebrow playfully.

He nods toward her wrist. "The method of delivery doesn't seem to have bothered you so greatly as to affect your ability to accept it."

"Well, this is twice now you've given me this particular piece of jewelry, and I figure throwing it at you a second time is probably pushing the boundaries of my finely-honed southern charm." She looks down for a moment, tweaks the bracelet in question, flicks her eyes back up to his. "So, what's the story with this thing? I mean, cheesy ass-kissing princess line aside."

He smiles. "It's a long one. I'll tell it to you some other time."

She nods slowly, looks down to the coat in her arms, speaks directly to this little folded wet square of material. "Actually, I was hoping…I could stay here tonight. I mean, I was looking through some old videos on my phone of me and Elena and Bonnie back before…_everything_, and I just…I don't want to be alone. Not tonight." She lifts her eyes very carefully, stands staring right through him. "And maybe," she tips her head just a little in concession, "I missed you. Just a little. Like, an immeasurably teeny tiny bit."

There is a little smile, just at the corners of her lips, a tiny trace of a thing, a small concession, a miniscule admission.

He leans forward to set his elbows on his desk.

"Why would you even need to ask?"

* * *

God, how really just super _annoyingly _endearing it is, when he smiles with his whole face.

* * *

She lays her coat across her old bed, tosses her umbrella down beside it, pulls her curls back, lets them go, taps her fingers, curls her toes, paces toward the door with hand to her forehead, marches back to the bed with it dangling down by her side.

He taps lightly against the door. "Drink?"

"No!" she calls back through the wood.

Breathe in, out, Forbes, open the damn _door_-

"Gonna' take a shower! Thanks anyway!" she says brightly instead, and now she brings that hand back to her forehead, and she lightly digs the heel into the skin, because _God _that is so not what she came here for -overpriced soap, equally expensive shampoo- she could get that all back at the hotel, she is not there for a _reason_- she is here because so is he, because she missed him and she is _sorry _everyone she is so so _sorry _but somehow he opened her up and he crawled underneath and it's not that it's ok, it's not that _anything _he has done will ever _ever _be all right, but it's also not _everything_.

She glosses over so much with her bright sunshine smiles and her smooth candy rehearsals- volunteer, charity advocate, she aspires, she perspires, she inspires, blah blah- but all of this is only a paint, sleek finishing polish.

See, what she really is is scared and petty and jealous and neurotic and controlling and God so _many _horrible flaws, a thousand ugly under layers, but you want to know what else?

She loves her friends and she wants them all to be happy, she mourns their failures and she adores their triumphs, she once rescued a kitten from a plastic bag in the park, she just wants her mother to see her, she just needs somebody to understand, she eats with a monster's sharp white fangs but she dreams with a human's frail hopeless heart, and the thing about these little layers is that for a thousand years he too has held onto them all.

Tyler ditched her in a note and Elena walked right past her without a word, but in the middle of a war he flew back just to watch her graduate, and though Damon reduced her to a thing he knew her for so much more at a glance, and she is done being _ashamed _about this, she is through saying _sorry_, say good-bye to her final apology, she tried so _hard _for you all and it just…_devoured _her, ok?

Somewhere along the way, Caroline Marie Forbes got wallpapered over by Elena Gilbert and buried beneath Tyler Lockwood and set aside for Stefan Salvatore, everyone's pain holds so much more weight than her own, hand-wave her grief, kiddie-pool Caroline will be over it in a day, give her another party to plan, just march her on past those 50% off promises, here sweetie have something shiny.

You can't _dehumanize _her like that.

She is not made up of your assumptions, she is not beholden to your preconceived notions, and if Elena can get her nasty freak on with creepy date-rape Damon then she can love Klaus _freaking _Mikaelson just as much as she damn well wants.

* * *

"I'm sorry."

He looks up from the shelf in front of him, a worn copy of _Moby Dick _in his hand.

"That's what I actually came here to say. I mean, I wasn't, like, lying earlier or anything, I _don't _want to be alone tonight, not on my birthday, not when last year Bonnie was still alive and we had this little party -funeral, really, because they decided that what I really needed to do was say good-bye to my old life, you know, my humanity and all that -and so many people are _gone _now, and ok, none of this is really the point, the point is I said a lot of things I didn't mean and I know I hurt you, and I'm sorry for that." She takes a deep breath.

He puts the book back slowly.

"So. There's my own lame-ass apology. I mean, it's a little cheaper than yours, but in my defense, you were a way bigger jerk, so I think that's fair. And also, you're, like, a gajillionaire."

He doesn't understand this thing, love. Messy, incomprehensible, _irrational_, a thing to break a man and not bolster him up- of what need has he for _that_, when he still reels from his father's dissections and his mother's rejections. Rebekah makes a fool out of herself over it, Elijah turns his back on a brother just for the promise of it, but where is the _reward_: a man's flaws accepted, his strengths acknowledged, his bed just as warm on one side as the other, a companion always to stand at his side, to have his back, to remind him here is someone who _cares_ when his father's reminders grow too strong and his mother's indifference too clear.

But the _fear: _what if one day she is taken from him; how shall he go on if it fades; can he really be capable of this most tender of emotions, this creature who does not understand, who has left so much of himself unexplored, who brings monsters to their knees with only a name-

Have you really found it worth it, Bekah, when you have given so much and got nothing in return; can you still tell him it's commendable, Caroline, with your friends who loved you too little and your mother who did not understand you enough; for this smile on her face he is expected to endure so much- it will all be bloody _worth _it, will it-

Yes, he thinks as he takes in her smile and he is transfixed by her eyes.

Love, love, love, he mused once with a man called James sitting dead beside him. How unnecessary. A man gets himself killed for it, when he could have lived on half a century more.

But what is time with no one to fill it; what is a _life _lived always alone; what is _unnecessary _about this smile he cannot help but return?

"So," she says, tapping her fingers against one another, her feet fidgeting just a touch. "I guess I'll go take that shower now. I mean, with the air cleared and everything."

"Caroline," he says, and he grasps her arm as she spins on a heel to leave, his fingers careful. "I'm sorry. As well. I said a few things I didn't- truth be told, I didn't mean anything I said."

She cocks an eyebrow at him, his hand still on her arm, her hip angled slightly back toward him. "Well I hope that's not exactly true. I mean, you did say you would take me to Paris, or Rome, or Tokyo, or wherever else I wanted to go. And that I was beautiful. Or, excuse me, 'ravishing', I think is what the kids are saying nowadays. You don't have to take any of that back."

"The 'ravishing' is a given, love."

"I know." She smiles.

She has turned herself all the way round to face him once more.

"Ok, so, you're not very good at this whole apology thing, I'm going to assume because in three trillion years of wandering around kicking over baby carriages and mugging sweet little grandmas, you haven't taken very much time out to own up to your jackassery. So. Any idea what comes next?"

He lifts his hands helplessly. "I fear I'm drawing a blank, sweetheart."

"Really rough, verging on gross, probably illegal within the continental U.S. makeup sex," she says, and shoves him back onto the bed.

* * *

He bounces once.

She pins his wrists above his head, locks her thighs down tight around his hips.

For such a domineering super freak of nature who could probably hold her down with just a pinky finger, he seems pretty contentedly complacent, trapped here underneath her.

"If this was what you wanted for your birthday, all you had to do was ask, sweetheart," he says with that little dimpled smirk of his, and she leans forward and pierces his throat with her fangs, just above the curve of his collarbone.

He bows up off the bed and yanks one hand free to bury it in the curls at the nape of her neck, his breathing ragged, all of him suddenly tense, and for just a moment she pulls back to admire the curve of his neck as he drops his head back against the pillows, his mouth open, his eyes half-lidded.

And then she takes the hand at the nape of her neck and she peels it free, pressing it back down alongside the other. "Be a good little Original Hybrid and stay. Kay?" she directs him, and then one slow inch at a time, she begins to pull up his shirt, letting her lips trail along after, tasting his abs, his nipples, his shoulder.

He makes a noise in the back of his throat.

She bites his neck, his shoulder, his ear.

She drags her nails down his chest until he bleeds, cleans up after herself with deft little flickers of her tongue.

She slides one hand down through the soft blonde hair that encircles his navel and dips down below his waistband, slips her fingers through the buckle of his belt, and now suddenly she is on her back, her dress already gone.

He rips her panties.

Ok, now she's sorta' pissed because even on freaking _sale _that was a $30 pair of the combination sexiest, most comfortable pair of underwear she has ever owned and just because she said rough does not entitle him to- oh _God_ Jesus _Christ_-

He slides his tongue out of her, kisses down one thigh to her knee with unhurried reverence, slides his nose back along this line he has just traced, his breath warm, his hand trailing after.

"Klaus- oh my _God_-" She grabs helplessly at his hair, arches hard up off the bed as he slides his hands beneath her ass and he begins to kiss and lick and suck just exactly freaking _right_, his tongue leisurely, his fingers practiced, and now it's her turn to throw her head back against the pillow and make little back-of-the-throat noises that tighten his hands on her ass, his fingers digging down into her skin. "Stop. _Stop_," she gasps, struggling up onto her elbows. "I'm about to-"

"Well, I thought that was sort of the end goal now isn't it, love?"

She meets his eyes and holds them very steadily. "Take off your pants _now_."

He fumbles getting them down.

She yanks him up against her, slick skin to slick skin, and for a moment he presses his lips to hers and he merely breathes against her, his forehead to hers, his hands braced on either side of her head, and then a surge of her hips and a buck of his and he is all the way in.

She holds onto him by the shoulders.

They kiss frantically, a little sloppily, her legs locked at the ankle around his waist, his hands in her hair, tearing and clearing aside the bra they forgot to take off, skimming down her stomach to find her clit as his hips pause for just a moment and then begin their steady rhythm once more.

"Bite me," she gasps when he kisses from mouth to cheek to throat, and now she feels the twin little stabs of his compliance, the surging of his venom in her veins, the hot lapping of his tongue in the open wound-

"_Harder_," she hisses, and underneath her fingernails his shoulder muscles bunch and beneath her ankles she feels his hips pick up the pace and he digs in deeper, darts his tongue in after-

Oh God oh God Oh God God _God_-

He pulls away, his eyes still feral, veins prominent, fangs lowered, and now she shifts herself up to suck her blood from his bottom lip, licking and kissing and biting down until he shuts his eyes and he lets out another one of those noises, his hips slamming into hers hard enough to bruise now, his nails breaking skin where they dig in just beneath her breasts.

He bites her again, a tiny little nip this time just above the nipple where she is most sensitive, kisses the mark until it heals, drags his lips from breast to shoulder to chin, and now as he shifts himself far enough forward to find her mouth with his once more, she flips them both over, and she rips into the side of his neck until he cries out.

He locks his arms around her back, presses her down against him, his head thrown back, hair mussed, heart pounding, breaths asthmatic-

She drags her nails down over his nipples and three more hot wet seesaws of her hips against him and Jesus goddamn fuck fuck _fuck _this release goes on for so _long_, one wave after another-

"Oh my God oh my _God_- Klaus-"

He pulls her face down to his and he kisses her until he comes.

She slumps on top of him for a moment after he is done, catching her breath, his arms draping loosely over her waist, their noses grazing as they recover.

He tightens his arms around her waist and kisses her neck softly, once, twice, and now on the third he lingers, just leaving his mouth there, burying his nose and his lips in her skin, his breathing still ragged, his heart too fast beneath her fingertips, and God, why can't she just _trap _this moment; why must the seconds scurry by and the minutes tick forward; why can't she just _have _him like this, sweaty and overwhelmed and still shaking underneath her.

Everything- it all gets pulled out from beneath you. Think the ground steady, the path ahead stable- just watch, just _wait_ for it to all come back around, for your friends to leave, your lovers to forget while the clock clicks on and the years roll past and you can only stand so impotently on the sidelines, forever a spectator in this story that was supposed to be yours.

He pulls slowly away to lean his head back against the pillows, watching her so closely.

"Caroline," he says hoarsely, and she presses her palm down over his lips.

"No," she tells him.

Not yet.

Not while she is still reeling over this friend who was taken too soon and these others who never quite cared enough, not while she just cannot let herself _believe_.

She reaches out to carefully brush the curls from his forehead, and she gives him this little smile, just a tiny thing, something to hold him over, to nurture his hope, and God how freaking _adoringly _he returns it.

"Is this how you settle all your little spats, love?" he asks, lifting his eyebrows.

She cocks one of her own. "Yes, actually. Elena and I were quite the scandal in grade school."

"I imagine you've always been a rather trending topic on the grapevine." She feels his hands shift a little against the small of her back as she sits up and shakes out her curls, their skin separating with a little wet pop.

"By the way, not to change the subject, but those panties? You're going to replace those. They were my favorite pair."

He has not stopped smiling. "Of course. In future, I'll be sure to ask whether you've a pair of expendables on or if I'm free to have my violent way with them."

"No you won't."

His smile has turned into a smirk. "I'll make it worth it."

"Ugh." She rolls her eyes at him. "Your ego is so huge there is literally no more room for me in this palace-sized bed." She rolls off him, collecting her torn bra and panties with a grimace and tossing them over the side of the bed. "And now I really do need that shower."

He sits up as she swings her legs over the side of the bed, that little dimpled super annoyingly hot smirk still on his face. "Need any help?"

* * *

"Ok, so what's with all the creepy murder textbooks?"

"'Creepy murder textbooks'?"

She slips from chin to cheek on the pillow she has propped herself up against, flicking her eyes back toward his bookcase as she burrows her hands deeper into the covers, legs kicking lazily in the air above her. "'Serial crime: Theoretical and Practical Issues in Behavioral Profiling'? 'Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives'? 'The Psychology of Serial Killer Investigations: The Grisly Business Unit'?"

"I like to keep up on the latest advancements in criminal investigation."

"Why? To cover up all your various nefarious deeds? It's not like you can't just compel people to forget anything they saw, and I'm sorry, but 'thousand-year-old vampire/werewolf hybrid with delusions of grandeur and anger issues' is probably not going to pop up on any criminal profiles, like, anytime ever in the history of the world. So I think you're pretty much above suspicion there."

"Surely not delusions, love. After all, wasn't it someone in this very bed who mere hours ago deified me?"

"The 'oh my God' and your name were completely separate, and should not have been construed in any way as an assigning of godhood- let's just throw that out there right now as my blanket sex disclaimer, ok?"

The ass does not have the common decency to wipe the smirk from his face for a single freaking second. "Whatever you say, Caroline."

She rolls her eyes and kicks her foot lazily in his direction. "No, seriously. What, were you a cop in a past life or something?"

"Yes, actually."

"Really?" She shifts onto her side and slides one hand beneath her cheek, watching all the little undulations of the muscles in his bare back as he slips his hands up the bed and beneath the pillow he presses his cheek down into. "Are you sure you don't mean mafia godfather? That strikes me as being more your forte."

He smiles. "In 1947, I was a detective with the LAPD."

"Wait- Los Angeles? 1947? Wasn't that the year of the Black Dahlia murder? Was that _you_?"

"Your assumptions are wounding, love."

"Please."

"No. Even I'm not quite so sadistic. I thought it might possibly be our friend Stefan, up to his old ripper tricks again. I was in Seattle at the time the story hit the papers, so I decided to pop down and have a look. I compelled my way up the ranks of LA's finest, got my hands on the case files, had myself a peek at the morgue. It wasn't him; the MO wasn't the same at all. Papers had got it all a bit backwards. Reporters are so inclined toward sensationalist incompetence; I've eaten more than a few of them in my time."

"So you went all the way down to California just to pick up where your bromance left off." She sits up a little straighter, draws her knees in toward her chest, the hem of the t-shirt she has donned to sleep in rustling along her thighs. "Why'd you join the police force, if you just wanted to hang out? Why get yourself access to the case files, the body, law enforcement…you were worried about him, weren't you? You were afraid some hunter would catch onto him and stake your little bromance right in its tracks. You were going to cover up for him."

He gives a little scoff and looks away.

"Please. I know that you have a heart, and I know that it lives on solely out of hope for Stefan's smile."

She sits here watching him smile at her like he doesn't and he has never and he will never see anything else, and for just a moment she thinks about the end of all things.

Kind of an odd thought, post-coitus, mid-pillow talk.

If one day the world ceases to rotate and the stars crash in great white flumes of volcano steam to lie in scatterings of broken glass across the ocean floor- if one morning she wakes to no sun and she finds when she steps out her door an entire planet altered, inhospitable white as far as the eye can see, solid oceans, flash-frozen prey- she is still going to be here- he is still going to _want _her-

"Can I ask you something?" she says softly, and he lifts an eyebrow and slips one hand out from beneath his pillow to gesture expansively. "When you understood that this was…you know, forever…I mean, when it, you know, really sunk in that you were still going to be around in, like, a _trillion _years- what did you do? How did you feel about it?"

"I was afraid."

"Really? You?"

He looks down and tightens his jaw. "It meant that I no longer just had to endure my father for the remaining duration of his human lifetime. And that I had to keep the secret of my mother's death for an eternity."

"Or risk the rest of your family leaving you," she finishes quietly.

"Well. We see how well that's worked out, now haven't we?"

"You could try being nicer to her, you know. I mean, believe me, I understand how hard it is to not just throw her curling iron into the bathtub and wait for the socket to short out, but she's not wrong about the things she said to you. You do treat her like shit, Klaus."

And here comes his little 'how-dare-you-question-me' eyebrow quirk, his jaw winching even tighter, his lips tightening.

"Don't give me that look."

"I don't need advice on how to manage my own family."

"It's not advice. It's the truth. Something I know you don't like very much if it's anti-you."

"Is this what I have to look forward to with you hanging about?"

"You mean recurring truth bombs delivered with just enough sass and cuteness to keep you from eating me?"

She lifts her eyebrow.

He mirrors her expression.

She smiles.

He returns the gesture.

The window above the little antique drawing desk on the far side of the room explodes.

* * *

Somehow, she is on the floor.

She is not precisely sure how she has made it into this little pile on his carpet, there is so much pressure inside her skull, twisting, twisting, her belly storming, her throat raw, and God listen to the _screaming _-is that her- how can that be _her_-

He is curled over the top of her, his chest tight against her back, his arms around her shoulders, cheek pressed to her head.

There is a sudden wrench inside her skull, a letting go, and with an inhale that burns her sandpaper throat she lets go of this forearm across her chest that she cannot even remember gripping, and she lurches forward onto her hands and knees.

He is gone in a blink.

She peers back over one shoulder through the wild jumble of her bed-tangled curls to see him pause for just a moment in front of the window, and then he turns, and in another blink he crosses the room to retrieve the shirt she earlier ripped off him and discarded so carelessly on the floor. "Get dressed."

"What the hell is going on-"

"Nik!" Rebekah thunders from downstairs.

The door slams behind her.

For just a moment, his relief is so overwhelming he has to shut his eyes.

He vanishes through the door with his shirt still tangled around his shoulders.

She takes the hall at supernatural speed, blows into her room, yanks open one of the drawers on her bureau so hard she dumps it all over the floor, scrambles frantically through it for a pair of jeans she fumbles twice about the ankles before she at last has them up over her hips.

"There are wards up everywhere. I had to circle round the whole bloody block and take several back alleys just to get here," Rebekah is saying as she makes her way down the stairs.

"What's going on?"

"Well, it would appear the witches of New Orleans have risen with a vengeance." He flashes from the base of the stairs to the front door, flings it wide, attempts to step through.

She watches him pause at the threshold, and swing back around with a grim look on his face.

"Are we bloody trapped here?" Rebekah demands, and now there is a little touch of hysteria in her voice, just enough to ratchet her own panic up a notch, and now inside her throat her kettledrum heart pounds harder and she feels inside her sudsing gut another little surge, an upheaval, and three long breaths and a brief flicker of her eyes and she finds her center once more.

"We're fine in here," she says, flicking her eyes over toward him for just a brief second.

He runs one hand over his stubble.

"Bekah, go on and raid the safe, would you? There's a good girl."

"Nik-"

"We need to keep them at arms-length, and we haven't exactly got any other way to touch them at the moment, now have we?"

"Most of them are bloody _antiques_."

"There's a good stash left over from the 20s that will do well enough. Off you go."

Rebekah disappears.

He turns to face her.

"Klaus?"

"They're going to make a try for the house. Perhaps our little hunter friend has let it slip that we're harboring a weapon that can kill an Original vampire. We're going to have to try and hold them off."

"We're going to try and hold off an entire army of freaking _witches_?"

"I imagine they'll be a bit spread thin, attempting to keep those barriers up. They'll send in their little minions to do the job, though I wouldn't count them entirely out of the picture."

"Ok, so we can hold off some wolves, right? I mean, even if they get into the house-" She falters as he takes her face between his hands and stands stroking her cheeks with his thumbs, his eyes boring into hers. "Why are you looking at me like that? You could kill a gazillion of them with your pinky finger, right? Without breaking a sweat? They're just _wolves_, Klaus; it's not even a full moon- they can't even take _me _on, let alone two originals-" She wets her lips, feels him run his thumb along this path she has just taken with her tongue. "And we don't know where Galen Vaughan is. And he might be with them. And he could kill me in the time it takes me to bring the entire prom committee to tears and maybe he can even incapacitate you two long enough to poke around until he finds the one thing that can extinguish the entire freaking vampire race in three hits- oh _God_," she breathes as he lets her ramble on, his hands warm, his eyes soft. "Are we going to die?"

"You'll be all right, sweetheart."

But he kisses her too hard, when he pulls her in close enough to rest his forehead against hers.

* * *

He watches the boy go down in a wooden rain.

"A higher-up in Marcel's ranks. They're isolating them with these wards, taking out as many as they can in one clean sweep," he comments quietly, popping open the action on his shotgun and dropping a shell in either chamber.

He snaps it shut with a neat flick of his wrist.

He's forgotten the feel of one of these in his hand, the varnish of wood, the cool slip of trigger, hammer, safety catch, the thunder of a round discharged, death put to flight, the brief kick of stock into shoulder, the _scent _of it all: the gun smoke in its phantasmal fog all about the barrel, the sharp nickel tang of steel, that faint clinging on of the forest loam buried beneath layers of chemical polish-

He stands on the sill to fire, just as far forward as the ward will allow him to lean, and now the boy's attacker drops in a red mist.

There are three more isolated gunshots, one nearly on top of the other.

A fourth.

Silence.

In the shop just across the street, there is a flickering among the spectral wax of the jacket-draped dummies.

Beside him, Caroline breathes so shallowly he can scarcely make out the scraping of her shirt along either collarbone.

Bekah crouches to the other side of him, one of the Mausers which saw him through Ireland in her hand.

The dawning of realization is a brisk thing, a sort of tsunami emotion, and now three of Marcel's inner circle throw themselves in rapid succession against the ward nearest the pub from which they have stumbled, swearing, tearing, flailing fruitlessly about with fangs, fists, feet-

They turn to flee down a nearby alley.

Three more shots.

He cocks his head, listening.

More flickering, in the shop across the street. Far too much for an isolated man: the rustling of multiple outfits, the soft clearing of numerous throats, the nervous popping of manifold knuckles-

They've got themselves a little garrison round those fashionable wax corpses with their collars so neatly turned.

A little chattering river, from one of the clubs up the street: half a dozen new targets.

They scatter before these unseen volleys, knock one another about, stampede friend and foe alike, throw themselves with gaping mouths and streaming eyes against these wards which yield to no strength.

With a pop the streetlights sputter, shatter, plunge the street into blind midnight.

There is a lengthy hush, this held breath of war that stretches for eons across battlefields painted in mortar dust and soldier blood.

A storm does not arrive with no herald, she gathers her clouds, blots out sun, sky, stars, breeds anticipation with her little tornado gusts and her tentative showers.

And then the downpour.

This little garrison across the street with their noisy trousers and their loud hearts is merely a decoy, he understands now.

But how could they possibly have _concealed _themselves from his superior ears and his oversensitive nose and his perceptions honed by centuries-

Ah.

Well-played, little witch.

He takes half a dozen rounds to the stomach, just as many to chest, neck, shoulders, slumps forward to lie with leaking mouth and fluttering lashes against the ward.

* * *

She grabs him by the elbows and hauls him down off the sill, his shotgun clattering over the edge and down onto the lawn.

"Klaus?" she breathes, slipping her hands through all the blood on his face to cradle his cheeks in her fingers.

She looks up to meet Rebekah's eyes. "He took a head shot."

"Then he'll be out for a minute or so. I hope your little finishing classes taught you how to shoot."

* * *

Seat the magazine, work the bolt, pop the stock to the shoulder.

Aim, fire, _breathe_, caress the trigger do not jerk, center the sights, brace the elbow, pull the stock in tight, pick them off as they come, do not _think_, never stop to consider-

The smooth working of bolt, the flawless motion of trigger, steady hands, quick eyes, these are the only things she _needs_-

One of them throws.

Rebekah catches this little makeshift fire bomb, holds it disdainfully for a moment, hurls it back down among their midst.

It bursts with a sharp crack against the face of one of the foremost invaders, and with a scream he ignites.

She leans out to shoot, ducks back behind the wall to load.

"Where the bloody hell are they all coming from?" Rebekah snaps, laying down a sharp burst of cover fire as the first wave reaches the lawn and bellies out in the grass, weapons out before them, feet kicking along behind, their advancement noiseless, their sweat unscented, hearts silent, breathing muffled. "I can't even bloody _smell _them, or hear them, or-"

There is a sudden thump against the sill of one of the side windows, and with a jerk they both whip around, flash forward together, drag the first wolf to breach the house forward into the living room to finish him off with extended fangs and grinding stilettos.

She hears another thump, leaps from one window to another, the rifle still in her hand, no time to shoot, _thrust_, always through the stomach and not between the ribs, Klaus told her, and now with a little cry she sinks the bayonet in to the hilt, kicks the boy from its tip, and would you freaking _wake up you stupid jerk_-

Her leg buckles.

Her shoulder jerks.

Everything around her red, the stuff just _atomized_, vamp, wolf, everything intermingled, all of it in a slick grease across the floor, the windows, the bright Viridian lawn-

"Mag!" she screams, and in half a blink Rebekah whirls, tosses her one of the magazines, whips back around to her own window in time to get a barrel right to the throat, little white pieces of her neck scattering in a grisly snowfall across the carpet-

She back hands the guy down onto the lawn hard enough to tear his head from his shoulders.

Caroline slaps the mag home, cycles the bolt, aims-

But shit shit _shit _one of the assholes crammed himself right underneath the sill and with this new witch-inflicted blindness she didn't hear a freaking _peep _out of his frantic rabbit heart or his panicked sprinter's breaths, and now up over the sill crawls his hand, down over its edge drops this little black ball she cannot dodge in time-

She screams, she drops the rifle, she brings her smoking red hands to her scalded white cheeks and over that sill he rolls, pistol in hand-

The hand disappears.

The stump left behind spurts.

Klaus slams his face twice into the wall, tosses him with awkwardly lolling neck and still trickling wrist back out the window, checks her briefly with a hand on either of her cheeks, bends down to retrieve the rifle in a sleight of hand so quick she misses the transference from floor to fingers-

Someone kicks in the door.

He snaps the bayonet off the end of the rifle.

"Nik! We have to get those bloody wards down."

"I'm open to suggestions, Bekah!" he calls back over his shoulder, decapitating this newest intruder with a casual flick of his wrist.

There is so much _movement _beyond the neatly-trimmed front hedges, but where are all these little indicators of _life _with which she is bombarded so relentlessly every day: the fragrant throats, the tempting thighs, femoral artery, jugular vein, everything warm, pulsing, thundering away just beneath the skin- how can she be so _sightless_-

"Caroline!" Rebekah calls out sharply, and a sudden blur of motion puts them shoulder to shoulder, she still facing inward toward that gaping front door, and now a thrust and a sharp twitch of Rebekah's shoulder against her own and she hears the damp little plop of someone's heart against the floor. "That might have hurt." She hefts the axe she has collected from her victim in her hand for just a moment, and then she spins and launches it right over Klaus' shoulder into the forehead of a man who pops around the mangled front door to level his gun at her brother's back.

Klaus lifts his arm to wipe the blood from his forehead, the rifle still dangling from one hand.

He looks over at her. "Are you all right, sweetheart?"

"Fine," she says as steadily as she can, and she holds up her hand.

He tosses her the gun.

The next wave crashes down over them.

* * *

War is such an impersonal thing, for a man who has been granted forever.

The guns are impressive, the horses magnificent, the cries of the gut-shot and the stink of the decaying amusing, the frailty of man never more on display than when he has been unraveled in intestinal loops across ground he mere hours ago trod with impunity, but the ending has already been penned for once such as him, and to walk without fear among spiraling mortars and hissing gas-

Rather a let-down.

His surge of adrenaline is only a volatile mixing of human chemicals he no longer needs but has not lost, his shaking hands merely an extension of this evolutionary amalgamation, the momentary hiccup of his heart just an instinct.

What does he with his myriad centuries care for some cause that in a handful of decades will be buried amongst dusty academia?

But this, mates-

This is his bloody _home_ and these women are his family, and is there anything more worthy of every effort he can expend- has there ever been any greater cause than this sister who will not leave him and this girl who has somehow chosen him?

They break through the door in a surge, one great wave of sweat-slick fighters, all of them scrambling, fanning out, brandishing weapons that they fire and fire again, until his living room is only one vast wall of smoke and cinders, the girls mere shadows flickering in little fish-school darts here and there, snatching, breaking apart, tossing aside-

He slaps a pistol spinning from a hand, snaps the neck of its wielder, hammers a short sharp upper cut into the solar plexus of his friend-

Caroline flashes briefly into existence before him, tears out a heart, vanishes once more into the gloom-

And now from the vast front window there chatters the first warning rattles of a volley which like all the others has snuck up upon them, and still buried in the carotid of one young lad who twitches against him like a wayward puppet, he watches Caroline take the full brunt of this volley to her back and sag with hardly a gurgle to the carpet.

He unlatches his fangs.

He kicks aside two still bodies and another which still groans and shudders in its final ammonia-scented death throes, his hands darting out instinctively to either side of him, punching down through slippery red cartilage, taking with him these little trophies he carries forward for a few feet before scattering them about to be crushed beneath his boots as he advances.

He is shot, stabbed, doused, but haven't you _heard_, mates, about this impervious abomination who responds to neither your vampire poison nor your lupine toxin; bite him, vervain him, pour your wolfsbane down his throat, fill his heart with your pretty little cherry wood ammunition, see how much he bloody _cares _when you stand between him and this girl-

* * *

Move move _move_-

Her cough sprays red all across the formerly pristine trillion dollar Biblical era Italian _whatever _carpet, but her feet scramble up underneath her and her shaky cloth knees buckle only once, and into the face of the jerk trying to stab Rebekah goes her fist, and now around his own throat wrap Rebekah's long white fingers, and with a loud crack he is thrown aside, back through the window he soars, onto the lawn he limply tumbles-

Every breath spills more red down her chin, the smoke stinging her eyes, the bodies tripping her up, the bayonet he snapped off the end of his rifle somehow in her hand and God how _pliable _they are, how reluctantly they release this knife she sticks down deep inside them and twists until something spurts-

Rebekah spins past her to cover her flank; Klaus looms up through the smoke to get her back; fatigue misdirects her stab into the side of some guy's body and now with a chalkboard screech she glances off the ribs, loses her grip on the bayonet, strikes out with her fist instead, one good shot to the jaw-

Klaus snaps a kick into the guy's kneecap, twists his arm up against his spine and jerks him back into his chest, darts his face down for one brief taste-

* * *

"You have to stop."

She does not so much as twitch. "Jane-_Ann_."

There is a nearly infinitesimal tightening of the shoulder muscles, the subtlest acknowledgement of this plea she does not want to hear in her voice.

"Take the wards down- at least the ones on the Mikaelson place. That girl is _linked _to me, remember? If she dies, I go to. That still means something to you, right?"

"This is our best chance," Jane-Ann replies tightly. "We're not going to have an opportunity like this night again for a long time, Sophie, you _know _that. Everything is aligned just right; there's not going to be another lunar event like this for years, not one where we can draw so much _power_-"

"I'm not asking you to drop _everything_. All I'm asking is for you to let that girl go, so that she has a fair chance. Don't keep her penned up in there, where she's a goddamned sitting duck."

"If I drop the wards on the house, Rebekah and Klaus Mikaelson are free as well."

"And if you don't _I die_."

Doesn't this fucking _mean anything_- because her clock stopped at twenty-four, because when hunger seizes her by the throat and froths her instincts all to fucking storm, she responds not with rumbling stomach or creeping headache but upraised veins, pitch eyes- because he took her warm human pulse and he froze it with a bite she is not your goddamned _sister _anymore-

"Jane-_Ann_." God, listen to her voice crack; this is not her; she does not fucking _beg_; she should not have to go down on her knees before her own sister, but look at that _back_, the way it does not so much as tic, how can Jane-Ann just keep it fucking _turned _on her like that-

Through the window of this little bed and breakfast where Jane-Ann has set up base, she sees the Mikaelson manor in little snapshot pieces: the tidal surging of all those bodies flowing in through the front window, the coiling smoke, the thrashing boots, the little raindrop pieces of all those who didn't make it through, but look at how many _penetrate_, watch them slip over, disappear beyond, imagine what might be goddamned _happening _in there, Jane-Ann, just for a fucking _moment _you shut your _goddamned eyes _and you picture that little blonde sunshine bitch taking a bullet to the heart, a stake to the throat, and then you travel back along all the little threads that fate takes and frays all to shit when this one strand snaps prematurely, and you watch the girl who traded you clothes and punched your first boyfriend in the nose when he stomped your heart to shit take a knee and cough up her fucking lungs and sink forward to powder her ancient mummy bones all over this pretty little fucking carpet.

"Drop the ward."

"I _can't_, Sophie. I'm sorry."

And she does sound sorry, you know.

It fucking chokes her a little, how goddamned _sorry _Jane-Ann sounds, but have you ever heard the old adage, Jane-Ann, about _sorry _just not being goddamned _good _enough; you have to suit actions to words, you have to open your eyes and draw back your concentration and you have to decide fuck the good of the many, one life is worth it, this is my _sister_, cock suckers-

"Drop. The. Ward."

"No."

"Drop the _motherfucking ward_!" she screams, and lunges forward.

* * *

This is all she's going to feel, ever again: the tearing up and spilling over of her smoke-stinging eyes, all the little shattered fragments of this volley she wears in pieces beneath her skin, the friction of Rebekah's shoulder against her own, the warm pressure of Klaus' fingers around her wrist-

She ducks, she swings out, she kicks and she guts and she tears down so deep, and still they keep _coming_-

* * *

Her hands find Jane Ann's shoulders and curl up into her collarbone and there is a scream, somewhere in this moment of pounding blood and fangs dropped on instinct, hers or Jane Ann's, she is not sure-

* * *

If he could just bloody hear them, smell them, _anything_-

* * *

This sound a head makes, when it strikes glass.

Sort of a melon cracking, a wet crunch of gristle left behind on the bone.

And then the stars.

An entire new galaxy, a winter layer, little December spider webs tinged still with the last paprika dusting of fall.

And now the frenzy: the copper blood in a perfume all around her and the rage still high in her veins and in a haze across her eyes and she slams your head back again, _again_, because didn't she tell you to _stop_, didn't she motherfucking _warn _you- didn't you _fucking love her enough to quit_-

* * *

Sweat in her eyes, blood in her throat, all the little wet gurgles of those who will not see morning, the stench of the shit and the tang of the piss, is this all she's ever going to _know_-

* * *

"_Sophie stop_- Sophie _stop _goddammit _let go_-"

* * *

He keeps his back pressed to hers and he fires away into the smoke with the Mauser he has recovered from the floor, his ears ringing, his throat bleeding, leg gashed, elbow porous, a dozen neat little holes all round him, but they don't bloody reach _her_, and this is all he needs.

* * *

She hammers and she hammers and she fucking _hammers _and still it isn't enough, still she has to hit harder, make you cry louder, draw out your screams in little rattling bursts that splash so wetly in your throat, smash and smash and _smash _because isn't this what she _is _now, all monster, no woman; look how her fangs slide down and her veins thrust up without even a _thought_-

* * *

Klaus rotates around her left side, his shoulder in contact with hers through the entire revolution, his pistol sweeping after, and now one shot, two, and there is a fragrant geysering, a head snapped back and a throat blown open-

* * *

One more jerk of her hand yanks your soggy red skull up out of this glass with its jagged new constellations and suddenly the roaring in her head shifts, recedes just enough for her to hear instead this tinny plink plink plinking of all the little clots that well up through your hair and sneak in little aromatic rivulets between the soft gray sponge of your brain and down onto the floor and oh God God _God what has she done_-

* * *

Look at his girls, aren't they _magnificent_- Bekah with her fangs to the hilt, Caroline and her pretty curls whirling, flashing out here and there- still on her feet with her back torn to shreds and her forehead open to the bone- see how she holds her ow-

"_Nik_!"

* * *

***Drops cliffhanger***

***Runs like a bitch***

**In my defense, they did do it.**


	2. Part Two

**A/N: So here we are, after the last part's rather unkind cliffhanger. Much love to you all for only using shouty capitals against me rather than tracking my IP address and showing up on my doorstep with sharp implements in hand.**

**So. We have come to the NOLA flashback depicting the very beginning of Marcel and Klaus' relationship. I actually had a lot of issues researching this section, because it was hard for me to find information specifically regarding NOLA in the 20th century, so I just sort of worked around that by looking up information on the early 20th century in America in general, as well as some basic history on New Orleans. The main historical event I wanted to work around, i.e. the turf wars between the Provenzano and Matranga families, was also very difficult to find information on. I can find several different sources stating that many historians believe organized crime in America actually started in New Orleans rather than the more commonly portrayed New York or Chicago, but they all say pretty much the same thing, which is merely that the two families butted heads over the Provenzano's monopoly on South American fruit shipments, with the Matrangas trying to horn in on their territory, and that eventually war erupted in the streets. They called a brief cease fire in 1890 to murder a police superintendent who kept sticking his nose in where they felt it didn't belong, and in turn the citizens of New Orleans gathered a lynch mob and killed eleven out of nineteen defendants who had been brought up on charges in possible connection with the superintendent's death. I know things were still ongoing during the time period I have chosen to portray because the head of one of the families (I can't recall exactly who at this moment, and it's not important right now) was dethroned sometime in the 1920s when he was gunned down by opposing mobsters, but I don't have many specific details. I will continue to pursue this, because the NOLA flashback will actually be split up over the course of three fics (including this one); I decided while writing this first section that I had too much time to cover and developments to unravel to compress it into even two parts. This first part is basically an introduction to this turbulent time period; the rest will go on to depict the relationship between Kol and Klaus (and the events leading up to his daggering), Klaus' twisted tutoring of Marcel, and the beginning of the tensions between vampires/witches and some of the original uprisings that preceded the current day rebellion. **

**I really only have two notes in relation to terminology, which is that 'The Black Hand' was a letter with a black palm printed onto it which was used to extort money from the people who received it. (Actually, technically 'Black Hand' was the name of the assassin, but it's in reference to the letter.)It was understood that if they didn't pay up or if they went to the police, they'd be killed. (And sometimes stuffed in barrels and left on street corners or in alleyways. Nice, huh?) Also, the 'Commercial Hotel', which I have made their regular haunt in this fic, is still alive and thriving in New Orleans; it's now known as the Hotel Monteleone. Oh, and I almost forgot to mention, the 'nipple' on a musket is the little piece of metal where the cap is fitted. The hammer strikes the cap, which causes the explosion that ignites the powder and fires the ball. Just in case that sounded really weird to anyone not familiar with black powder weapons. I have an 1861 Springfield I use for Civil War reenacting, and that particular term elicits some interesting looks when talking about it to people who have never fired a black powder weapon before. Haha**

**And I'm going to point out now that there is a bit of dude on dude in the flashback section. It's not particularly lengthy or graphic, but it is there, so a heads-up if that's not your thing. The flashbacks will not revolve around Klaus' sexual experiences, but they will be mentioned and sometimes briefly depicted, and the guy gives me 'yeah, mate, I like ladies but I know my way around a dick' vibes like you wouldn't believe. In a thousand years, he's never dipped his paddle in the other side of the river? Pshaw. Don't piss on my head and tell me it's raining.**

* * *

He hits the staircase.

Down he slides, up again he goes, jostled about by this great unseen hand that spins him first right, now left, in this vast hurricane exhalation that careens him off walls, into the formless phantoms that stumble about in gun smoke and blood mist, one shoulder at an angle, his right pinky powdered, his mouth streaming, his nose flattened-

"_Nik_!" she screams again, and then she too is lifted, flung off into the chaos, and back he is swept, off these feet he has only just gained he is torn-

He is pinned against the back wall by these spectral fingers, slammed with a popping of his ribs and a crackling of his joints through paper, into plaster, and now through the front window he watches half a dozen of Sophie's coven spread out across the lawn, hands lifted before them, coats flapping about them, hair in banners, in ribbons, in little ruffled spikes-

This great unseen hand shifts, and it delves down inside him, and it wrenches until he screams.

* * *

She huddles shaking beneath the window sill as the wolves pour themselves back through the doorway, dragging their dead, shouldering their wounded, bayonet across her knees, entrails draped over her foot, all of her smeared, punctured, leaking.

Maybe there comes this moment for any soldier in any war, surrounded by all the little pieces of people he used to know, his legs sunk to the shin in this awful wartime broth of black mud, blacker blood, blackest shit.

Maybe she is just a coward.

But she huddles here, and she drops her bayonet and she hugs her knees, and she is just so _frozen_, watching him scream.

He twists until he cracks his own spine and he screams until he dribbles all the blood his lips have left to give down his chin, but he can't _escape_, he can't break loose, charge them with his usual frothing bull fury, rain down destruction, pull the earth up beneath him, tip over buildings as a child upsets dominoes, and how can he be this _helpless_- what is she supposed to _do _when they have _him _of all people, peeled open like it is nothing-

He gets this brief reprieve.

Just half a second, but for creatures like them, for whom time holds no meaning, for whom a decade is merely a blink, a century only a nap, it is long enough for him to open his eyes, to meet her own, to slur her name, to tell her to run.

Yes, _go_, up the stairs, through his studio, all the way to the back where she may cower in clammy terror, where she may wait this all out in terrible mausoleum silence, hand over her mouth, fist to her throat, to be rescued by soft yellow morning.

Run, her animal instincts urge and her self-preservation reiterates.

_Run_, his eyes beg and his lips dribble.

A chance offered must be taken, an escape presented cannot be _squandered_, how can an avenue out be given the blind eye, why would you just turn that aside, throw it _away_-

But a soldier does not make his way home through soft yellow mornings.

He does not cringe in his terrible mausoleum silence until his comrades unearth him among sandbags and shoulder joints and carry him home to his mother.

He will never pull himself up out of this awful wartime broth with his knees hugged to his chest and his hand over his mouth.

And so she reaches her hand blindly down for the bayonet she has dropped, and she carefully gathers her legs up underneath her as he twists again, screams again, breaks and bleeds and sags.

She shuts her eyes.

Just for a moment.

Just until her breathing levels out and her hands steady just a little and the storm in her stomach settles to calm glass waters.

And then she spins with this bayonet in her hand and she hurls it in one lightning-bright bolt across the lawn, into the throat of the bitch nearest the front.

Her throat jets.

Her head sinks back with a soft fountain bubbling, sways for a moment, peels free of her neck.

She is already moving.

A loaded gun, an abandoned knife, a shattered fragment of table leg, give her _anything_, she needs another _shot_-

She is jerked forward, launched with a crack into the ward still stretched unyielding across the window, blinded by white stars, dropped into black nothing.

* * *

He smiles with his head still lolling on his chest.

"You'll have to let me down eventually," he calls hoarsely out to them, and he looks up from underneath eyebrows tinged red, and he smiles even deeper. "I think you're going to regret that."

* * *

She sinks to her knees with Jane-Ann in her arms, her heart suspended, her throat blocked off.

Rip the wrist, tip back her head, fucking _drown _her in the shit if you have to, just _do _something _goddammit- _do not let it end like this, not by her own family's hand, not now when this war has only just kicked off, not when they were going to come through it _together_-

"Jane-Ann," she says.

"_Jane-Ann_."

"You're fine; you are _fine_. It's going to be ok." She's sorry. She's sorry she's sorry she's _sorry _she will never not be so fucking _sorry _for the rest of her eternal life, and just think of the Christmas presents a fuck-up like this warrants, Jane-Ann, come _on_-

"_Please_. Oh, Jesus Christ-"

You are not allowed, you told her once when sloshing with bourbon she put her head in her hands and she breathed, "I don't want to die; _Jesus_, Jane-Ann, not like this, not at twenty-four, not never out from underneath his yoke."

You are not allowed, you told her, and you put your arm around her shoulders and you helped her off to bed, and when next her faith wavered you did this all over again, half-carried her up those liquid fucking stairs with their treads always just a little farther off the next time she lifted her foot, and you laid her down in that bed, and then you curled up right beside her and for one night she was again eight and innocent and sheltered so warmly by her big sister's arms.

And so you are not _allowed _either, Jane-Ann, not when she _needs _you, ok -remember how _scared _she is, beneath all her layers of bitch- remember that though she shucks your concern and she walks on alone what propels her forward and what keeps her going is this intrinsic _knowing _that you will always be there, that you will never not have her back.

Eyes open, shithead.

Boys to annihilate, clothes to exchange, secrets to swap, right, _right godfuckingdamn you_-

Jane-Ann.

_Jane_-_Ann_.

"Could you say something?" Sophie demands. "_Please_?"

She opens her mouth.

She blinks, she shudders, she dies.

* * *

He sees Caroline twitch and one of the witches falter.

* * *

She sits before the large front window with the Mikaelson manor laid out before her and the dark pitch street below her, and she sees nothing.

* * *

Oh _God_ has anything ever hurt this much before-

She is submerged for only a moment, and then through one layer after another she drifts, fights, emerges, comes to on a slick red floor with one hand bent awkwardly beneath her, back smoldering, cheek stinging, scalp trickling.

She rocks herself once, twice -put your _back _into it, Forbes- and then with a final convulsive strain of everything she is, she flops over onto her back, and she looks up into his eyes.

All of him stained, splattered, pieces of him poking out or jutting in, he hangs against this wall with his filthy shirt torn and his crusted hair wild, and a blink of his eyes and a tip of his chin and he is suddenly the most feral thing she has ever seen: demonic smile, animal eyes, don't they understand what he is going to _do _to them when this power that like all other supremacy can never outlast an eternity fails them at last?

They send another jolt through him.

He jerks up, he arches forward, he begins to laugh.

She watches his mouth drip and his eyes spark and she stretches out with the tip of her foot, lengthening all the muscles in her leg until like her back they too smolder, sputter, catch fire all together, and with a shaky little breath and a brief squeeze of her eyes, she hooks the trigger guard of one of the pistols discarded nearby, and she kicks it up toward her hand.

She flops gracelessly back onto her stomach, her joints clicking, her exhalations spraying, her inhalations bubbling.

She grips the windowsill and hauls herself up against the ward, head lolling, eyes blurring.

Somehow the pistol comes up and with her numb deadwood left hand she steadies her shaking right wrist, and she fires until the chambers click and the barrel stops bucking and the shards in her back widen the hole in her lungs, and now as this ward she leans herself weakly against flickers and gives way with soft plastic pliability, she slumps forward over the sill, onto the lawn.

* * *

He drops, he surges forward, he is out the window in a flash.

* * *

Yes, _scream_, let your terror be known, your pain heard, tip back your head and give to this moon the mythical howlings of the beast- _beg _him a little as you claw away at his hand and you reach up for his throat- the _fire _in those who breathe yet but are already dead-

He strews them in wet little pieces across the grass, blurs to cut off the final two as the plucky little sweethearts turn to make a run for it, smiles so brightly as they stare up at him from swaying rubber knees and wide doe eyes.

He slides his arms intimately round their waists, holds them both against his sides.

He turns his head first to the one on his right, slips his nose up her neck, presses his mouth right to her ear, his fangs at her lobe, his fingers denting her hip. "Go back to your little friends, and tell them what happened here."

And for the pretty little thing on his left: "Tell them about what I've done to you, with all this power at your disposal- tell them how you couldn't _stop me_, even then."

He smiles.

He breathes in her fear and he shuts his eyes, and he crowds himself right up against her, this hand round her waist nearly a caress now, his smile deepening. "Tell them I'm coming for them."

* * *

She wakes up with his hand in her back, and she sits up with a scream.

Oh God oh God oh _God _it _hurts_- she can feel every little twist of his fingers, each scrape of the nail, the torque of wrist, the grating of bone, wood, organ, all of her nerve endings alive, on fire, everything white, black, this entire spinning room a carousel of nightclub strobe, firework constellation-

"_Stop_! Stop it, _please_!" she sobs, scratching at the arm he has looped around her front just below her breasts, propping her upright. "_Stop_-"

"Shh." He presses his cheeks to hers. "You're all right, sweetheart," he murmurs, and now she feels his hand slip itself free and she hears against the floor all the solid little thunk thunk thunks of the shrapnel he has dug out of her back, and with another heave of her diaphragm and a clench of her raw, raw throat, she slumps back against him.

He unwinds his arm from her waist to lift his hand to her hair as she leans her head back against his shoulder, blinking the tears from her eyes.

"Bekah?" he calls out, setting his cheek against hers once more, his fingers sifting her tangled red curls tenderly, his breath warm against her lips.

"I'm fine, Nik," Rebekah says wearily from the other side of the room, just an indistinct shape in the still-clearing smoke.

"Is it over?" Caroline asks him hoarsely.

He pulls back with his hand still in her hair, and he gives her that little you-are-everything smile, and deep down inside of her this knot that has tied itself around her heart frays and flaps loose and unravels completely.

She smiles helplessly back.

"It's done, Caroline. You were fantastic," he says so proudly.

"And what about me, Nik?" Rebekah demands, before them in a moment with hip cocked and arms across her chest. "No praise for your baby sister's matchless sharpshooting skills?"

He cups the left side of Caroline's jaw in his hand, kisses the corner of her mouth, and God how _euphoric _this is, how proudly his eyes still flash and his lips still curl as he looks up with one eyebrow lifted to meet Rebekah's lofty gaze.

"You were without equal, sister," he replies playfully.

"Mark this day down in your calendar, Caroline. You'll never hear him so appreciative of anyone who isn't himself ever again," she says, but there is a smile on her face as she looks down at them both, and maybe it's just this camaraderie of the warrior that Klaus has occasionally spoken of, but she looks up from his arms and she returns this little smile with one of her own.

* * *

"Ow! Would you watch it?"

"If you'd keep still, this might be a touch less painful, and certainly a bit quicker."

"_Ow_! Ok, seriously, _that _one was payback for the whole Silas imaginary white oak stake thing."

"You took a pair of bloody _pliers _to my ribs. This isn't anywhere in the general realm of that particular incident, Caroline."

"I thought you got them all earlier?"

"I fetched the ones that were making a beeline for your heart, love. You've still got a back full of shrapnel."

"Well, could you at least maybe try not to take half of my freaking _back _with them?"

"Your spine's still intact, isn't it? He's being positively gentle. Now if you don't mind, don't you have a mute button or something? Your shrillness is wearing."

"Oh, I'm sorry- am I interfering with your digestion? Random Tourist Number Three isn't sitting well? Pardon _me _for contributing to any discomfort you might be experiencing at the moment. I can't _imagine _what you must be going through- those heels do look like they pinch a lot. And your dress is obviously just so horribly tailored that it has to be causing some problems with, you know, riding and whatnot. I guess that explains a lot- are your panties equally ill-sized?"

Nik looks up from her back with that irritating little isn't-she-fantastic smile. "She gets a bit feisty when she's in a mood."

"'Feisty'? Is that really the word we're going with?"

Look at him bloody _fawn _over the stupid little infant.

He plucks free the last of this slick red shrapnel, drops her shirt, tentatively kisses her shoulder, and do you want to know the bloody stupidest thing of all?

She wants him to be happy.

For a thousand years he has not loved her enough, always has he chosen his power, his plots, his stupid bloody _hybrids_, this family he created because she wouldn't do on her own, and she looks down with her haughty pressed lips and her small stinging heart so worn to the quick, and she wants this girl to love him back, to see beyond Klaus, to understand Nik, to never again let him experience Mother's indifference and Father's disgust.

What a bloody idiot _girl _she is, after all these years.

* * *

He listens to the sound of this settling that comes after man has lain himself down before the cannon with cheek to the mud, musket cocked, cap put trembling to the nipple, October in a bright Halloween rainfall above him, December in a stinging flour down the boot, round the throat, in numb black death upon the fingers.

He knows it well.

Unnatural stillness, the murmuring of death, this condition which like so much else in life is never quite grasped by the feeble human mind- silence, no, the Reaper makes his arrival on sure feet, he is heralded by an orchestra, woodwind gasps, bass moans, the grief of the strings with their steel guts in a fingernail keening- never is this battlefield calm truly a silence, for one who understands how to look, to listen, to absorb.

He turns from the front window as the girls make their way back down the stairs, freshly washed, taking their shots as usual, Rebekah with a jab, Caroline a rejoinder, their footsteps thunderous upon the tread.

He cocks his head. "Bekah, is that your soap she's got on?"

"The French milled L'Artisan Vanilia? Yes. She was _foul_, Nik. And that nasty hippie rubbish you have the gall to call shower gel is disgusting. What the hell is 'patchouli' anyway, Nik? It smells like dirt."

He smiles. "And did you scrub her off as well?"

"Please. If I was going to have some kinky lesbian shower experience, she is the _last _person I would erotically soap myself up for."

"You could only be so lucky," Rebekah snips.

"_You _could only be so lucky," Caroline snaps back. "I have it on the authority of 7th grade Elena, who I practiced all my kissing on, that I am completely amazing at it."

"Well, one can hardly dispute that, now can they?"

"Please, Nik. You know I have a delicate constitution."

"Yes, Bekah- I've noticed that."

"Don't mock. You know I hate it when I'm slighted. I might regret saving your little girlfriend's life and make amends by eating her."

"His 'little girlfriend' handled her ass just fine, thank you very much. Who punched that one jerk in the head while he was trying to stab your eye? And booted the other one across-"

"Why is it still talking?" Rebekah asks him, crossing her arms.

"_Excuse _me?"

"Ladies." He folds his hands in front of him. "Can I trust the two of you to act like mature, immortal adults and be left to your own devices for a bit without my having to clean up a mess when I get home?"

"Where are you going?" Caroline demands, flicking wet hair from her eyes. "You don't know what's still lurking out there."

"I think whatever may still be lurking has been sufficiently cowed by that little display on the lawn. Not a peep from the witches in over an hour now- they've clearly exhausted their resources for the night."

"You _think_," she says, stepping down off the bottom stair and onto the stained carpet. "You don't know that for sure. Maybe you shouldn't just go charging off into the night without back-up."

He smiles and he takes a step forward, his hands unlacing. "I think it's time Marcel and I had a bit of a chat."

Rebekah descends the final few steps like a queen, chin high, hand trailing. "You don't honestly believe you're leaving me behind to clean all this up, do you?"

"We'll leave the worst of it for the moment. The staff will take care of it in the morning."

"I hope you're paying them ridiculously well."

"The older ones are compelled. The little redhead takes her compensation in Nik's bedroom." Rebekah smiles down at him as Caroline's head snaps round, hair whipping, eyes flaring.

"_What_?"

"She's joking," he says with a dark look to his sister.

"It's what she'd prefer, anyway."

"Really," Caroline says flatly.

"Unfortunately for her, my tastes run in only one direction."

"'Desperate', 'lonely' and 'without standards', judging by your latest conquest," Rebekah butts in.

He snaps his eyes up over Caroline's head to where his sister hovers imperiously on the stairs, still with that bloody Cheshire smile on her face, head tilted. "You're free to make yourself scarce at any moment, Bekah," he hisses.

"I'm not your servant, Nik. You can't dismiss me."

"I could let a decade in a box dull your tongue a bit."

"And then who would you leave behind to watch precious little Caroline while you gallivant off into the snake pit? Give my love to Marcel, by the way." She smiles. "I'm sure he'll remember what that's like."

His face relaxes just a touch at that. "I'm sure he's still much acquainted with that particular sting, Bekah."

"Wait- you had a thing with Marcel?"

"A rather torrid affair back in 1915, shortly before we left for Europe, yes," he answers, stepping up in front of Caroline to touch a finger to one shower-ironed curl. "Rebekah was having a bit of fun, Marcel was enamored. Their split wasn't so much a parting of ways as Bekah smearing him about in pieces beneath her heel." He tucks it behind her ear, lets his finger trail timidly along her cheekbone, this allowance of free touch, casual affection she has granted him still so novel, unknown, a fumbling about in the dark for one whose touch lands always as a hammer and never a caress, whose fingers understand how to make a cripple of an athlete, but to explore as a treasure soft cheek, softer lips- now there's a mystery for the ages.

She looks up at him. "So what are you going to do?"

"I think it's about time Marcel and I stopped butting heads and put an end to this little uprising, before it gets anymore out of hand. I'm sure he'll see reason after tonight."

"You mean after you storm the castle, break his throne, impale all his minions with his crown."

He smiles and again he touches her hair, her cheek, her chin. "Nothing so dramatic as that, love."

* * *

"Ok, are we really going to just leave everything like this?"

"You're free to get down on your hands and knees and scrub it all up yourself, if it bothers you so much, Caroline. I don't mop floors. Except with those who have displeased me. A line which you are skirting dangerously at the moment, by the way."

She rolls her eyes, tosses her curls, taps her foot. How could she have ever for a freaking moment even entertained the _notion _that Klaus was the most unbearable of all the Mikaelsons?

"Besides, you heard Nik. The staff will be back in the morning. They'll handle it then. It's a chance for humans to actually be useful for once; don't take that way from them."

"Ok, elitist snob bullshit aside, do you really want to sit around smelling this all night?"

"It's not the worst thing I've ever lived with. Besides, do you think I know where Nik keeps the bloody furniture polish?"

"Well, we could at least wipe some of it up or something. Pick up anything that's completely beyond repair. I know everything in here is probably a gajillion-year-old antique, but most of it isn't garage sale bargain bin junk at this point."

"Nik's going to be pissed," Rebekah says, indicating with a nod of her head the fragment of picture frame Caroline holds up in one hand, a little yellow-smeared corner of canvas still clinging to its edge. "That's a Monet. Not one he stole from a museum, either, I don't think. Hold it up a little more? It looks like the San Giorgio Maggiore at Twilight; he purchased that one directly off Monet."

"So they knew each other?"

"Monet was a vampire, actually. About 300 years old when Nik first met him, in 1910. I was never acquainted with him; Nik and I were still a bit at odds at the turn of the 20th century. But he told me later that he and Monet ran around Amsterdam together for a bit, until he hurt Nik's feelings or refused to fall into step or whatever it was he did that prompted one of Nik's usual tantrums, and he had his head ripped off. Then Nik came back here, where the family was living at the time. He did that, occasionally- popped out of the city to participate in a war here, an uprising there. But he was here in New Orleans for nearly fifteen years straight. He liked it here, I remember. It's a sort of cultural melting pot, some of his favorite cities combined into one single den of iniquity." Rebekah pauses for a moment, crosses both arms over her chest, stands tapping one foot as she scrutinizes with pursed lips the mess before them. "You weren't completely worthless tonight."

She cocks her eyebrow, sorts the warped frame into a pile she has begun to accumulate to her left. "Did you just say something that wasn't 'I can't believe my brother deigned to touch one dirty peasant ho hair on your head'?"

"Savor it while you can, Caroline."

They sort, kick aside, work from corner to corner in silence, the street beyond so eerily still in this stagnant midnight nothing, these late black hours which tiptoe past on silent predator toes.

"Thanks," she says finally, not looking up from the picture she has unearthed from the wreckage, a black and white of Stefan and Klaus in evening wear, Stefan's arm around his shoulder, such a freaking _smile _on Klaus' face, his hair slicked, his eyes radiant, and carefully she smoothes down one bent corner and she tucks it safely away in the pocket of the jacket she has once more donned. "For not letting me die. I mean, it's not like you didn't have opportunities."

Rebekah hesitates briefly, darts a look at her, shakes the glossy blonde hair from her eyes. "I'm sure I'll regret it."

"You probably will. Just like I have regretted my friends' complete incompetence where murdering original hybrids is concerned a gajillion times since I've met him. But I'm still glad for both."

"Nik often brings out one's murderous side whenever he opens his mouth."

"Don't you ever wish just a little that those daggers worked on him? I mean, if you could just stick him in a box, just for a little while, that would be kind of nice. He could use a time-out every so often."

She gets another brief flicker of a look, a little smile, a slight softening of the forehead. "Once…back in the 1400s, during the War of the Roses, Kol and I got sick of his bullying and wanted to take him down a notch. Nik was in command of one of the Lancaster regiments, and the night before he was to lead them off into battle, we took some of his oils and painted him up like one of the street tarts. We had to be so careful not to wake him. Kol was…my brother had this way of making an absolute ass of himself that was just so difficult not to laugh at, and he sat there with me all night, pulling faces, imitating Nik, lining his eyes crookedly, patting on the bloody 'blusher' until he looked like a clown. Nik was so mad; he had to wait for it all to wear off." She looks down at her hands, this little smile hovering so tremulously on her lips, and how like her brother she looks when he is not posturing, everything soft, lit up, _approachable_. "It was a stupid human prank. It was…nice."

"I'm sorry about him," she says quietly. "Kol."

"Well, you didn't have anything to do with that, did you? Your friends left you out of that like they did everything else." She blinks very suddenly. "It's not like I don't know what that's like."

Three minutes from now, they will retreat to their safe havens, to these cramped little interactions of extended claws, bared teeth, but for right now- for right now she tentatively smiles, and she lets herself be warmed by the even more tentative smile she receives in return, and she goes back to her cleaning.

"Oh my God- did we just have a moment?"

"I don't know; but whatever it was, let's never do it again."

"Agreed. Although imagine the convulsions Klaus would go into if he came back to find us, like, hugging it out."

"That would almost be worth the century and countless murders it would take to bleach from my mind the scarring memory of embracing you rather than snapping your neck."

"Funny- that's about as long as it would take me to-" She is interrupted by the sudden ringing of the cell phone she has slipped into the pocket of her clean new jeans.

"Probably my brother, separated from the sound of your voice for too long."

She slips it out and flicks a glance to the display screen. "Stefan, actually," she replies, and taps the screen to answer.

His voice is so _warm_. "I tried you earlier, but you weren't picking up. It is now…12:23 and technically no longer your birthday, but I wanted to wish you a happy nineteenth in person anyway. Well, sort of."

God, this man.

How could Elena for one single insignificant _second _turn her eyes from him to Damon; how could she just walk _away _from this man who will never not love her enough, who will always give her a choice, who will never hold her pinned beneath him while he takes what he feels he is owed.

"Thank you, Stefan," she says just as warmly, and she leans back against the wall behind her, smiling until it does not hurt anymore.

"How's college?"

"It is _perfect_, Stefan. Exactly what I needed after everything, you know? Just to get away, make some new friends, get drunk, make bad boy choices." Ok, the last one is so totally not a lie, so she will not feel guilty, feeding him this total line in her brightest chin-up-we-can-do-this voice, and anyway, New Orleans has been an educational experience all its own even if it's less oh-God-I-over-slept-Professor-Maxwell-is-going-to-kill-me and more oh-God-Klaus-has-eight-jillion-enemies-and-they-all-know-about-his-little-teeny-marshmallow-center-for-this-fabulous-blonde-baby-vamp.

"I am not touching that. The help can deal with it."

She snaps her head around, makes frantic shushing motions at Rebekah, is rewarded by the same kind of oh-God-how-evil-am-I-isn't-it-just-freaking-_lovely _shit-eating smile her brother has absolutely perfected, and just see if you don't pay for that later, Original _Bitch_.

"…Is that Rebekah in the background?"

"No! The university has this really active exchange program, so we've got foreign exchange students just crawling all over the place, and my roomie is from England. They do kind of sound alike, though, huh? Like I need anything to remind me of her." She smiles into the phone, glares across the room. "I mean, if I never saw her again for my entire way too long life, that would just be way too soon, you know?"

"So you're at college. Right now. In your dorm room."

"Dorm room. Fabulous mansion tarnished by all the ghosts of her sexual exploits past. Similar enough, I suppose. Both have well-used beds."

She covers the phone. "Shut. _Up_."

"Oh, Caroline, calm down. As your freshly imported roommate, I'm just not yet accustomed to your American mannerisms. You might have noticed my older brother can be perceived as being a bit rude as well. Almost as though he was raised by wolves." She smiles. "He does seem to have a few things in common with them, doesn't he? Sometimes I wonder that he doesn't just turn into one, like some kind of man/wolf _hybrid_."

"Sweetie, didn't you have a class? That you're failing? Because Basic Math 101 is just so far over your head that you just can't make any sense of it? Oh well. Fifth time's a charm, right?"

"Right- isn't that the one with Professor What'shisnameagain- blue eyes, dimples? He seems to be quite taken with you. He's a bit old for you, though."

She can hear Stefan trying not to laugh on the other end.

"Caroline. I know you're not at school."

"Ok, I'm sorry- it is Rebekah in the background, but everything's fine. She's just here to drop off something from Klaus. I was there for a little while, but I headed back to school months ago."

"Uh huh. So, Klaus has created this whole alternate universe in his head where you stayed on in New Orleans with him because some vampire named Marcel won't let you leave because you're his best leverage against Klaus?"

"_What_?"

"Yeah, Caroline, he keeps in touch on a regular basis to make sure your mom is still ok. Granted, he goes about it in the rudest way possible; he opens with something about mine and Damon's general incompetence, throws in a couple of threats, then tells me to have a nice day in that voice he does. You know the one I'm talking about- it's sort of gentlemanly, and yet it has that underlying hint of I-will-murder-you-and-everyone-you've-ever-loved-unless-you-kiss-my-superior-hybrid-feet."

"Ok, so why did you just make me go through all that?"

"Because if you're lying to me it means that things are bad. And that maybe I need to worry."

"Which is exactly why I didn't say anything, because Stefan, I _promise _you do not have to worry about me, ok? Just keep my mom safe for me. I'm under the very creepily overprotective watch of the most powerful guy on the planet- I'll be fine. But my mom is not, and I need her to be there for me when it's time for me to come home, ok, Stefan?"

There is a long pause on the other end, and for a moment she just listens to him breathing, to the drumming of his heart and the whisper of his blinks, to the tick tick clicking of the clock somewhere within his house.

"Liz will be fine, Caroline. I promise," he says, and she shuts her eyes and she breathes out so hard, and when with a final good-bye he severs this connection to the last of her friends, she opens them once more to find Rebekah looking at her from across the room.

* * *

Ah, the sound of blood in the evening.

Drip drip drip drip drip.

Isn't it lovely, he thinks, and he swings the heads as he goes, smiling all the way.

* * *

Marcel, Marcel, Marcel.

Why the face, mate? Have you not seen this grand savior of your kingdom step from street shadow to hotel entryway, this most contrite of peace offerings in hand?

The enemy of my enemy and all that, isn't that right, Marcellano, son of Frederick.

He smiles up at the balcony over which Marcel stares, his hands tight upon the railing, his shoulders hunched about the ears.

Such _tension_, lad.

What's say we ease the burden a bit, hmm?

He walks forward.

He is met at the doors.

"May I come in?"

"Since when do you ask, Klaus?"

"It's rude to invite oneself into a man's home- that's his sanctuary after all, isn't it? And in the interest of peace, I've even brought a housewarming gift," he says, and he hefts the heads of these witches who dared stand against him and he drops them each with a wet little splat at the man's feet. "I apologize- there's more where these came from, but tragically, I ran out of hands."

With dead eyes and shaking hands, Marcel toes these little gifts with an immaculate boot and looks up so _brokenly_, poor lad. "They killed some of my best men today. Some of my _friends_."

"I know," he soothes, taking a step closer.

Such a load is caring, isn't it, mate?

"Perhaps we could do something about that together," he offers with his hand clapped compassionately round the boy's shoulder. "It's about time we stopped all this butting of the heads and put them together, don't you think?"

Weren't they once quite the team- didn't they once upon a time turn this entire city upon its bloody head- did he not take this boy in hand and show him real _power_, this thing which his ancestors for so long went without?

* * *

**New Orleans, 1907**

That great bonging of the clock- what a little thing to admire amongst all this polished luxury.

But these fabulous mechanical counters of time, this thing that may be caged but never truly snared tick on, and still he eludes you yet, father.

He crosses the lobby of the Commercial Hotel with a smile, hand tucked away in his waistcoat, his heels clicking upon this vast wax-shined mirror of a floor.

The porter gives a little twitch of his shoulders, smoothes his vest, straightens his cuffs, steps forward with his most helpful smile. "Your brother's here today, Mr. Mikaelson. In the lounge."

He stops.

He turns round with hand still in his waistcoat, smile just as pleasant. "Please. Call me Klaus. And yes; I'm here to meet him, actually. But, I suppose you think your attentiveness deserves a little something, now don't you?"

What a treat, how quickly the boy's eyes snap wide.

"I wasn't- I wasn't fishing or anything, sir, I just thought- perhaps- that maybe you would like to know-"

"No no no no- Tim, was it? Let's not be like that. Professionalism deserves a good turn, now doesn't it?"

The boy remains very still, hardly breathing, his eyes never narrowing.

How far his reputation precedes him- just watch how the twitchy little thing _flinches _as he reaches out with his hand and he pats him playfully on the cheek, his smile going even deeper.

He slips from his wallet five crisp new bills, and he tucks them away in the boy's front trouser pocket, lifting both his hands to the boy's shoulders as the poor little thing holds himself so carefully motionless, that little rabbit within his chest going going going.

"Take your mum out for a nice meal, Tim. I recommend the jambalaya down at the Napoleon House."

"Yes, sir," he whispers. "Thank you."

"There's a slight issue at hand, though, Timmy. May I call you that? I wouldn't want to overstep my bounds, after all."

The boy twitches his fingers, clears his throat, nods his head in three anxious little jerks of the neck.

"Excellent. Now since we're such great friends, I expect you to keep an eye out for a man. His name is Mikael. If you get wind of him in this city, Timmy, I need you to notify me immediately. Do you understand? Fantastic. It'd be most unfortunate for your poor mother if you didn't."

"What do you mean?" he whispers.

"Well, you see, mate, I'm afraid that if you fail to report to me in a timely manner that I'll need you to eat her."

"_What_?"

"Tim Tim Tim- there's no need for that sort of face, now is there, mate? I don't mean all of her, of course; I'm well aware the human body isn't really set up to process that sort of thing. Just a bit. Just enough to leave her permanently scarred, shall we say?" He pats his cheek again, tidies the boy's vest, tucks that little bit of crisp new green which peeks over the top of his pocket down out of sight. "Off you go, now."

* * *

"Ah, here he is- and now the party truly begins, friends," his brother says with a great flourish of his arms as he flings wide the doors and he strides into the lounge like all other establishments he steps foot within, as though this like all the world before him belongs solely to him, this most dreaded nightmare of the supernatural world.

Kol crosses the room in a flash and slings his arm round him with a smile. "Nik!" he crows, and how much warmth there is in this drunken greeting, how much _pride _he hears- do you see before you this man I call brother, isn't he _marvelous_, gents-

Do you see, _Bekah_, that there is a portion of this family which can acknowledge his worth, which has not let ninety-two bloody _years _elapse between visits?

He is just certain, sister, that that bloody toff was entirely worth this little tantrum of yours, that you'd not have made better use of your time at the side of your family who would never have fled without so much as a damn _word_.

The men seated round the table in the center of the room look up from their cards, wreathed in cigar smoke, alcohol fumes, their laughter dying away as those who have crossed his path before sit suddenly upright in their chairs, bending these frail little squares in hands gone to wood.

He smiles and sets his homburg upon the table.

"Jake, Nathan- good to see you again, mates. Families doing well, I trust?"

"He hasn't been here, Klaus, I swear," the little blonde on the right says hoarsely, bending his cards still more in his rigid white fingers.

"Well, isn't that fortunate? I'd hate to see anything happen to that pretty little girlfriend of yours. Disembowelment, was it? Then a quick jaunt into the sun? I certainly hope that never comes to pass; little messy."

"What a tease, right, boys?"

He holds his hands up. "Where would we be without a little anticipation in this world? The 20th century is entirely too entranced with immediate gratification, little brother."

Kol hands him a drink.

He clinks the ice in the glass with a little smile and points across the table to the man directly opposite him, his smile widening as this man gives him back such a charismatic quirking of the mouth. "Now you're a new face. And a bit out of place, here, mate. What's your name?"

Kol sits down on the edge of the table and with a press of his hands he slides himself across this smooth lemon-oiled surface to fetch up right beside the man with his charismatic little mouth, one arm going round the man's jacketed shoulders. "Nik, may I introduce you to a new friend of mine? Marcel, give my brother a nice welcome, would you? He's a little touchy about manners," he whispers right into the man's ear, giving an encouraging little pat to one of those jacketed shoulders.

Klaus gestures helplessly. "You eat one rude neighbor and suddenly you've got a reputation." He smiles.

He takes a sip.

"Marcel," he says, drawing these two syllables out, rolling them round his mouth with such leisurely menace. "Now my brother has just generously named you friend. Do you know what that means, mate?"

This fragile human called Marcel folds his hands together with another of those smiles which is almost too large for his face. "It means I better not miss a punch line."

He swirls his next drink round his mouth as he nods, his answering smile nearly as wide. "I love it when they're quick, brother."

"Anyone have a light for my brother?" Kol asks the group, rising smoothly to his feet and extending both arms out to either side, his eyes flicking round this tense little supernatural gathering with its single composed human. "I've got a surprise coming later, but I thought we'd have a round of cards for now. Nik missed last week's game, to all of our immense disappointment. Isn't that right?" He clicks his fingers at the broad-shouldered redhead sitting to the left of this Marcel, flips his hand, leaps down from the table. "Go and fetch my brother a chair. He's our guest, after all."

He seats himself uncomfortably close to the human, leaning back with one hand in his waistcoat, the other whipping round to catch the cigar Kol lobs to him from across the table.

The vampire beside him leaps.

Marcel shuffles.

He smiles.

"Winner take all?" he asks, reaching out to trace the carotid of the fidgety little thing beside him with an intimate brush of his finger, one eyebrow quirked.

"Nik- not before my surprise."

He withdraws his finger, tucks this hand away into his waistcoat as well, gives a regretful lift of his eyebrows, sinks a little deeper into his chair. "I indulge you far too much, little brother."

Kol grins.

He lights up.

"Deal," he orders.

* * *

There's a charm about this man.

Though he numbers only twenty-five trifling years he has acquired within these two decades the knowledge of how precisely to meet the gaze, to become absorbed, to never not take in.

And the _stories _he tells.

Sojourns into the white brothels, daring escapes, arrests dodged, brawls begun, cold nights on poorly-lit street corners, saxophone to his lips- what a time this little insect has had of it.

He's lived better of course, brought down kingdoms, sent peasants in a great sea foaming to pull from their beds sleeping royals, smeared men like ants beneath him, one-upped that terrible Vlad the Impaler with his pathetic little forest, but what a gift this man has for chatter, how pale his own experiences seem beside these breathless alleyway excursions filled with all the cold white smoke of his nervous exhalations, the thundering of the coppers just beyond.

All right, brother.

You may keep him, for now.

He hears in the street the sudden arrival of an automobile, its passengers embarking in a great flurry of rustling coats, adjusted hats, the scent of steel in a thick nickel perfume all round them.

He taps his cigar into the tray, watches its end scatter in warm cherry cinders across the tin.

Kol smiles.

He leans back, takes another drag, flourishes his cards with his free hand, tapping them in a rather catchy little rhythm upon the table.

The doors burst open.

"Right," his brother says, pushing his chair back from the table. "So, Nate. A little birdy told me you received The Black Hand and forgot to pay up, isn't that right?"

Nathan sets down his cards very slowly.

"I might have warned them that they'd need something rather special in those guns to deal with your disobedience," Kol says, and now with a great roar the men who fan out beyond the doors open fire.

Poor little Nate.

Never does make it out of his chair.

The Marcel chap throws a chair, kicks over the table, sends the cards in a thick snowfall through the air.

He remains calmly seated as the room erupts, fangs dropping, men screaming, the walls chipped to powder, the chairs to kindling, each ricochet magnified to cannon thunder.

Kol has divested himself of his jacket.

"Come on, Nik. They can't have all the fun."

He cracks his neck.

Kol wrenches from the overturned table one of its battered legs.

What abandon there is in a fight.

The cracking of bone, the tearing of sinew, everything of import to a man abandoned with his dignity: his morals, his principles, his wills, his will nots, stack them there, round that little puddle of his discarded courage, throw them aside, watch this most ethical of all men stampede his own, _smell _his desperation in rings round his armpits, taste this fear in its heavy pheromone fog, and isn't this all just that much more _magnificent_, when you have beside you someone to share this most cherished of moments?

Nothing more intimate than man's final moments, after all.

"Listen to that," he whispers in the human's ear as he hauls one of the gunmen screaming back against him and he cracks his windpipe like a twig.

Kol smashes in his head with the leg he still hefts in his hand, and a spray of red paints itself in a watercolor splatter across Marcel's cheek, the boy scrambling back just a little now as Klaus drops the gunmen in a slump across the edge of the overturned table, his arms swaying limply.

He reaches out in a blur to seize another, buries his face, pulls it away stained, watches the boy scramble back a little more, smiles through all this red on his lips, whirls past his brother to grab a barrel, to bend it in half with a casual flick of his wrist as it goes off with a piercing boom in his hand.

A little hop kicks him off the wall, lands him in a crouch on the man who falls to this momentum, and now a dart, a taste, a _savoring_: isn't this one flavorful, dear brother?

Like him to save you a little, he asks, and he tosses the man one-handed across the room to Kol, who catches him just as easily, who tears into the unblemished left of his neck and feeds until the man's life flees in pungent little rivulets down his legs.

They converge in a blink, and perhaps they're showing off just a touch now, but how wicked is a little hubris, for men such as them?

He leans over just far enough for Kol to roll himself with a little whoop across his back, his leg sweeping round, this impromptu club of his following after, and what a sound it makes when it impacts: just like the hollow clopping of that childhood chore, father breathing down his neck to cut faster, more evenly, see how Elijah manages it, boy, don't let a little discomfort slow you, weakling.

Kol grabs the last of them as the man makes a break for the door.

"Now what do we say, when we get home?" he asks playfully, holding the man by both shoulders.

"The Provenzanos set us up and we walked into a massacre," the man says blankly, blinking his dumb bovine eyes.

Kol pinches his cheek. "Very good, darling. Now, make sure you really talk up the brutality- and don't be shy about pointing out your own battle wounds, all right, mate?"

"What?"

His brother shoves his fist into the man's gut, flares open his fingers, widens in this expensive dress shirt he shreds so easily a jagged hole through which he pulls wet red loops of the man's intestines.

He takes his fangs to his wrist, holds the man flailing to this seeping little wound, yanks him back after merely a sip. "That ought to tide you over. Better hurry, though. That looks rather nasty, friend." He screws his face up sympathetically.

The man stumbles away screaming.

Kol retrieves his jacket with a flourish, whips it round behind him, slips himself back through its arms.

He leaves it open over his stained white shirt and holds out his arms. "How do I look, brother?"

"Now you're just showing off," he scolds with a meticulous straightening of Kol's slightly askew bowtie.

"How was that for an initiation, Marcel?" Kol calls over his shoulder to the human still huddling cautiously behind the table, just a touch less smiley than the lad kicked off this evening. "He wants to be one of us, Nik."

"Does he now."

"Now remember our little talk about keeping secrets. You've still got so many hoops to jump through, darling. I'd hate to end this prematurely."

Klaus smiles.

Kol claps his hand to his back and together they walk out into the lobby, his brother's fingers creeping casually round his shoulder, jacket flapping as he goes.

"You didn't see us," he calls with a sly little smile to the porter cowering in the corner, knees to his chest, arms over his head, eyes squeezed so tightly shut. "Isn't that right, Timmy?"

The boy lets out a strangled sob.

The doors admit them with a thunderous bang into the moist jungle steam of this stagnant southern world.

* * *

"Our brother has been exposed to some of the most powerful magic this world has to offer, and yet he is taken in by cheap parlor tricks."

"Elijah- lighten up. Look how he enjoys it."

"What is this man's name again?"

"Haven't you heard of the great "Handcuff King", brother? He's traveled all over Europe and the United States. Slipped Scotland Yard and a Siberian prison transport van, last I heard. Popular among the vaudeville circuit."

"Vaudeville. That would explain my unfamiliarity with him."

He smiles. "Your elitism is positively overwhelming, 'Lijah. There's the shoe shine boy now; why don't you go and get yourself a nice buff, brother? Kol and I can handle our poor taste without you hovering." He smiles again.

Elijah moves off into the crowd assembled round this pliable little 'magician' writhing within his straitjacket, the rope from which he has suspended himself creaking as he struggles.

What amusing angles he must contort himself into to slip free of this frail canvas prison.

He slithers an arm loose.

There is a little ripple of applause from these intent spectators with their eager eyes and their hands poised for the victory.

Kol tips his head toward his own. "What do you think he'd do if I gave him a little kick? How much of a challenge can it be, merely hanging there, Nik? Let's see him get out of it while he's dancing all round the place."

A woman cranes her neck round to gape her stupid predator horror at him, holding her little train stiffly up out of the mud.

Kol winks at her.

He puts his arm round his little brother's shoulders, stands with his hip casually cocked and his hand carelessly dangling. "Don't ruffle her like that, Kol. Her husband's a bit touchy about that sort of thing. Isn't he now, Countess?"

"Nik- don't tell me you put her legs up round your ears? She doesn't strike me as being quite so…malleable."

He watches her shoulders stiffen. "No, no- nothing so crass as that. I merely caught her in a little ménage à trois with two of her husband's business associates in one of the rooms of her husband's latest acquisition. Quite a little find. It's come in rather handy, wouldn't you say, Countess?"

She tilts her chin so haughtily and swallows so thickly, this lovely little thing.

He drops his voice. "I heard rumors of his last wife's unfortunate demise. Quite an ugly little affair. I wonder- what do you think he would have to say about this? I've often found myself curious as to how he would react."

"I've heard nothing of this Mikael," she rasps out, gripping her train more tightly.

"And I hope you never do," he says sympathetically.

With her elbow she opens a little hole in the crowd and she hurries away with tapping heels and flaring train, breath rattling beneath the strain of all this wet southern weight.

The magician twists, bucks, wrenches his other arm loose with a little flourish of his wrist.

Gunshot praise, the piercing admiration of those too easily impressed, ladies smiling, men with hands to their wallets, Kol clapping along with obnoxious over-enthusiasm, shoulders shifting beneath his arm, the moist threat of rain in a human-scented mist all about him, the shoe shine boy with his polishing rag in a rasp along leather sanded to mirror- how _intoxicating _this damp little city is.

He spots a flash of gold to his left, shifts his eyes to this bright sunlight glare, and what have we here, mate?

What a nice little Breguet you hang so carelessly from your pocket. Entirely authentic, nearly new- yes, thank you, he thinks he will help himself.

He lets the man feel him slide it free of his pocket.

"You put that back _now_," the man hisses between his teeth, whirling round with his fists already poised.

We've a _fighter _on our hands, have we, mate?

He smiles and he spins the watch upon its chain and now in this man's eyes kindles a little spark of doubt, a brief hint of uncertainty; perhaps this innocuous little man with his beatific smile and his pretty eyes is not all he seems, hmm; perhaps there lurks beneath the most innocent of sheep the fiercest of wolves; perhaps your hands large as hammers are no match for his own slender as a girl's, isn't that so, _father_-

"Right. Well." He gestures regretfully with one arm still round Kol's shoulders. "I'm afraid I'm going to need you to come and get it, mate."

Kol leans forward with a smile. "Please."

The man spins around and stalks away.

"I even asked nicely, Nik."

"I know you did." He gives his shoulder a conciliatory pat. "Lunch?"

"I thought you'd never ask, Nik. Something blonde. I had brunette for breakfast."

"Please keep in mind that discretion is a virtue, Niklaus," Elijah says suddenly, materializing at his left shoulder. "We don't need a replication of last week."

"I thought Nik's redecoration of that brothel was rather inspired. It must be the artist in him."

"I can't take complete credit; it was, after all, inspired by that Ratcliff Highway business. It's remarkable, the influence a particularly exceptional bit of work can still exert, nearly a century later."

A sudden wail from ahead silences Elijah's retort, and now all three of them look round to watch a lady with her arms in an awkward puppet splay, held just barely aloft by a nancy young gent in a well-cut three piece, his legs buckling a bit beneath this unexpected burden.

Her companion reaches distastefully into the barrel which has caused her such distress and lifts free a mangled head, its smooth oil hair slicked back from empty red sockets.

"I thought I smelled something delicious," Klaus comments mildly.

"Wonderful. The Matrangas got my little message, I see. What a week this is going to be, brothers."

* * *

In the streets they clash, these precious little humans with their ridiculous little claims to land that in another few decades will mean nothing to limbs bent to time and eyes frosted in centurial white.

He watches a Provenzano slaughtered, a Matranga tortured, barrels delivered, handprints passed round, Kol in a cheerful little froth about the entire affair, his brother nudging, nudging, always _provoking_: how magnificently he's come along, this boy who once shadowed him through the woods, bow in hand.

* * *

Kol brings the human round the house for drinks, lets them both into the parlor without even a knock.

"My mistake. I didn't realize Nik had company," Kol says cheerfully, snatching the decanter from one of the tables and pouring himself a generous glass.

He lifts his face from the woman's neck, his hand still working beneath her skirts, her head thrown back upon the settee, mouth open, fingers worrying her gown to thread, all of her flushed, trembling, poised gasping upon this brink she spills over with a sharp cry and a slick seizuring of her thighs.

She drops her fangs, leans in toward his throat, and now with a casual thrust of his palm against her chin, he snaps her neck.

He drops his hand to the hair of the boy thrusting away with such dedication over his lap, strokes it gently, lets his head loll back against the settee with a smile.

"Would you like to join, mate?" he asks, his eyes flickering, his fingers flexing.

He yanks the boy's mouth from his cock.

He snaps off a corner of the sofa's frame, he tosses it teasingly in his hand, he takes the boy through the heart.

"Oops; I suppose I should have said 'replace'. His technique was atrocious."

Give the boy a bit of credit.

He does not so much as slosh the glass Kol pushes into his nearly steady hand, and there's that _smile _again, as he lifts this glass to his lips and he tosses it back with one supple surge of his sweet young throat. "No thanks. Not really my scene."

He zips himself back up with a smile, crosses the room in a blur, takes one of the glasses Kol has lined up before him as he presses himself still-hard to the back of this human who at last flinches just a touch.

"That's a shame," he says with his mouth to Marcel's ear, thumbing the blood from his bottom lip to his tongue.

"Nik has a few boundary issues. Don't let it bother you- if you can say one thing for him, it's that he likes a willing partner, isn't that right?"

He lets his fangs shiver faintly from carotid artery to vertebral, draws his hand up along the boy's side to his shoulder, pulls him just far enough back to press his chest to the boy's spine. "That's right."

He lets go.

He reaches the doors in half a second.

"If you change your mind," he says, and he raises his glass in a little salute.

* * *

In a thousand years he has exchanged foot for hoof for wheel, watched countries die, men put to rest, tragedies blunted by this great sandpaper of all, time with her edge flush to the heart, grinding away as she goes, but never has he not been able to rely upon this boy whose admiration never failed as father's never flourished.

Sated on blood, drink, _death_, this most prominent lust mother embedded so very long ago, he sleeps like a child, one arm flung across his eyes, leg dangling over the bed.

There were once two boys.

Perhaps you cannot imagine.

Of course you could never imagine- what acrobatics must the mind _perform_, to reconcile monster and man, to picture two brothers, two _friends_ with their little mortal joys, swimming hole excursions, childhood pranks, midnight adventures-

Did you know-

Did you know that once this boy who kills so ecstatically took a beating meant for him, how _scared _he was to confess to father, here I am, it was I who damaged your sword-

"I was afraid he'd kill you, Nik," this boy said, and then he leaned his forehead against this steadiest shoulder of all, that of older sibling, big brother, eternal protector, and he dissolved into tears.

And do you know he never said a word.

He patted the boy's back and he dried the boy's eyes, but not once did he ever step foot in front of father to correct this wrong, to clear Kol's name, to take up this mantle he donned the day Mother brought forth with one last sweaty push this frail red bundle with its soft cushion of wet black hair, just padding enough for a tender chin.

He touches his hand very softly to this boy's hair that has never quite matured from down to bristle, and he sweeps it so carefully up off his unlined forehead.

"Nik?" his brother rasps sleepily. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing," he says thickly. "Go back to sleep," he assures him, and he kicks off his shoes and he lies down on the opposite side of the bed with his hands behind his head.

Kol claps him briefly on the shoulder, rolls back over into murky black dream.

He stays awake for a very long time, just listening to this boy breathe.

* * *

"The Matrangas sent you."

"Did I say that?"

"I believe you did, little brother."

"Sorry; memory must be a touch spotty. What I meant was your boss directed me here. You must have really pissed him off, mate," Kol says cheerfully, and he takes the most prized of his Louisville Sluggers to the man's face.

His jaw skitters across the bar.

His eye drops itself with a noisy splash into his mate's glass.

What an _ice _settles over this pub, hands frozen mid-reach, lips paused mid-sip, every limb, hair, smile cast in stiff marble relief.

Kol leaps with a jaunty little spring onto the bar. "Ladies and gentlemen: tonight my brother and I have something special planned for you all. A little contest, you might say. And even a prize, for the winner. Unfortunately, as in the tradition of the Roman gladiators, there can only be one. You, ma'am. You look like a fighter. Join me up here?"

Klaus hauls the woman Kol indicates up by the elbow, and flings her toward the counter.

She screams as his brother's fingers close round her arm and yank her up off the floor to sprawl flailing across the bar, upsetting mugs as she goes. "Now listen closely. I want whoever has enough limbs intact by the end of this to get himself- or herself," he smiles charmingly at the woman, "out that door to tell anyone who will listen that those Provenzanos have gone and outdone themselves this time. A whole _bar_, my darlings- and some of them innocents." He hugs the shaking woman against him. "All right; here are the rules. No weapons. Not a single broken bottle or blade, and let's all just empty our pockets of anything noisy, shall we? Revolvers on the tables, gentleman."

Klaus bars the doors.

Marcel shifts upon his stool.

"If you're trying to faze me, it's not gonna' work."

He smiles.

His brother hurls the woman to the jackals with a cry of "Begin!"

"Good," he says, and he leans across the boy to thumb from the bar some of the blood making its way in little creeping rivers across the wood.

He swipes it across Marcel's bottom lip.

"Just to give you a little taste, mate."

* * *

The thundering of the guns, blood set to flight, splattered bowels, empty bladders, dirt churned to mud- what a battlefield these streets have become!

He clotheslines a man, snags the shotgun that leaps from his hands, fires once, lobs it sideways to Marcel, wades his way into this little wrestler's knot of family vs. family, Kol at his side, the human sprinting to cover, his jacket shot to ribbons, one of his hands smashed to splinters, but the blood, the cries, the _lives _snuffed out in a blink-

He takes a knife to the gut, he laughs, he breaks the man across his knee and chucks him over his shoulder to shatter against the hotel just behind him.

Kol head butts one of the combatants; he rips out the man's throat as he sways drunkenly.

He ducks Kol's outstretched left arm; Kol rolls himself round his right side, and now up pops another, and how _slick _everything is on the inside- ever noticed how much slip the human body has got to it, how you must struggle through all these lubricated layers of elusive liver, oily spleen, how you must twist and twist and _twist_-

He dumps the man's intestines in a snake wriggling on the street.

The surge has reached the boy, and now they turn round to watch Marcel fire once, strike out with the butt, thrash and kick and _bite _this surge that upends him with a cry, slams him down on his back, keeps him pinned for only a moment.

What _potential _he has.

"Didn't I tell you, Nik?" Kol asks, nodding toward their eager young student, propping one elbow on his shoulder.

* * *

"Tell me, Marcel."

He swirls the A positive in his glass.

"What made you come to my brother, not determined to destroy him, but to join him?"

The human leans back against the bar of the Commercial Hotel's newly-renovated lounge, saxophone between his knees, chin upon the mouthpiece.

"Well, I'm not as innocent as my boyish good looks would suggest."

He smiles.

He sips.

"So it's the blood. You're one of those…what? Special types of peculiar taste? Like that chap round Whitechapel, a few years ago?"

"Yeah, sure," Marcel replies easily. "Left a string of mutilated prostitutes all over Storyville. Probably rivals even your count, Klaus."

He propels himself in a flash across the barstools between them. "_Wrong_," he hisses. "It's the _power _you crave; I can practically smell it on you, mate. You want what we have. Supremacy over man. You want to be faster, stronger, _better_." He sets his glass down and he leans in very close. "You want, to never be held down again."

Marcel swallows very carefully.

He watches the boy's pulse tremble in his neck, leap in his wrist, hears its wartime rumble, the river rushing of these well-stocked veins, thinks for just a moment of how this boy with his fire banked so carefully and his anger set to simmer would feel against his lips, his tongue, his throat.

He leans back just a little. "There was a man, a very long time ago, who held me down too. Suffice it to say, I may be able to relate just a bit."

Has he stood against man's prejudice for merely the way he wears his skin, for so petty a thing as pigment, for something so insignificant as race, this thing that shares the same frail heart, feeble lungs, fleeting life?

No.

But he knows a thing or two about a boot to the throat, of being always just out of reach, outside, _beyond_, never quite up to par.

Go on and ask him, mate, when last he flashed his fangs to a friend and did not gain a foe. Inquire of his days spent in a careful creeping beneath the watch of Father, master, who never named him equal, who always ground him down.

He clicks the ice in his glass against its side.

"Play that arrangement of Ave Maria you were fiddling around with the other night."

Marcel sets his lips to the sax.

He tilts the glass to his mouth.

* * *

He upends Kol's bed with a terrific crash, his brother rag dolling from mattress to floor, rolling as he hits, his face gone from lax to livid in a blink, his feet gained in a second, Klaus' arm round his throat in the next.

Elijah appears in the doorway. "Niklaus."

"He's hidden my bloody oils again!"

"Kol, I told you not to touch his art supplies."

He can hear the little bloody _shit _laughing even through his wheezing. "But look at his face, Elijah! You can't tell me this isn't entertaining, brother."

"Where _are _they?"

"I might tell you in exchange for that blonde you left the pub with the other night."

"I already ate her, you little ass," he hisses, tightening his arm. "Here's my counter-offer, little brother: tell me where they are, or I'll dismiss the staff for the day and use your face to polish all the furniture."

"Niklaus! Release him!"

"Oh shut up, Elijah. You know he needs a good beating from time to time, to keep him in line." He releases Kol with a violent thrust, flipping him backward into the wall.

He gets up with a dislocated shoulder and lowers his head in a surge that takes Klaus off his feet and slams his head into the end table pushed against the opposite wall, and now the room kaleidoscopes around him, becomes a carousel of misplaced ceiling, improperly-installed floor, everything a blur, Kol's foot in his gut, his fist in Kol's jaw, one of his teeth skittering about across the carpet, Kol's nose gushing, his hand crumpled-

"Niklaus! Kol!" Elijah barks, and a sudden yank at his throat and he is lifted by the collar, Kol hauled away similarly, both of them twisting, straining forward, kicking out-

"Oops, Nik- do you know what- I think I actually knocked them off the windowsill while I was sorting through your things. Some of your charcoal too. I hope two stories wasn't a bit much for them." He smiles through his split lip.

"I'm going to pop your head off and start a rugby match with it," he snarls.

"What was that, Nik? I'm sorry, I can't hear you over the sound of your whole studio being looted. I hope none of those frames were antiques."

"_Enough_. Kol, do not touch Niklaus' things. Niklaus, do not tear off your brother's limbs over something so insignificant."

"What would be significant enough for him to be allowed to tear off my limbs, 'Lijah? Just out of curiosity."

He ignores the question. "Both of you, go and clean up the mess you made last night in the French Quarter. Don't think I didn't hear about that little stunt with the Matrangas."

"_Where are they_?" Klaus roars, stretching out with the toe of his shoe just far enough to cave in Kol's kneecap with a wet crunch.

"_Stop_. Off to the French Quarter with both of you. Don't involve the human. He's a loose end; he needs to be cleaned up, soon."

He releases Kol first.

"Niklaus," he says warningly, cocking his head as their younger brother makes it to the door and vanishes beyond.

He jerks out of Elijah's grip.

"Don't touch him, Niklaus. I mean it."

He blurs to the door, reaches the staircase half a second later.

"Elijah! Nik just stabbed me!"

"Niklaus!"

"Technically, Elijah, I didn't lay a finger on him. The staircase banister did all the touching."

His older brother's sigh is a hurricane gust in his ears.

Kol yanks the banister from his stomach and slaps him across the face with it.

He beats Klaus to the front door with only milliseconds to spare, blurring through it into the street beyond.

* * *

"This the last of your little tests?" Marcel asks, giving a final yank of the man's arm, folding it with a loud wishbone cracking over his head so that all of him is neatly contained within this barrel Kol arranges with such great care in this foggy gray alleyway.

"That's _adorable_," Kol says, pinching his cheek. "Good work, darling. But, no, unfortunately to say, your initiation is not quite over."

Marcel darts a glance at him.

He shrugs.

"What can I say, mate. He's rather picky about who he turns."

"Unless there are nice breasts involved. Do you have nice breasts, Marcel?"

"'Fraid I'm fresh out, boys. I did escape the wrath of one night's angry white husband in one of her dresses, though. I didn't make a half bad lady, if I say so myself."

Kol cocks his head. "He thought you were his wife?"

"No. She wanted me to wear it while I fucked her. I was still wearing it when he burst in with his shotgun. And all the way home through Storyville. If the number of propositions I received is any indication, these hips were made for a skirt."

He dimples. "I'd have made an offer," he points out slyly.

"Yes, well, you're a harlot, Nik. It's sort of the shame of the family," Kol confesses, dropping his voice. "Put his pecker in anything, this one."

"Not at all true. I wouldn't have touched that thing you were hovering round the other night with the ten foot stick Elijah's sporting up his ass."

"You're just jealous, _Niklaus_. He wanted her first, Marcel, but she was so completely taken with me, she didn't have eyes for anyone else. She was a feisty little thing, too. Wanted to start off on top. She was delicious."

"She smelled."

"She did not."

"I prefer mine with a little more of an eye to their personal hygiene." He looks up at Marcel from beneath his lashes with another little smile.

"He flirt with everyone like this?"

"Just until he gets into your trousers. Then he brutally maims and/or murders you. Unless you're very, very good. How are you with your mouth, mate?"

"You'd have to ask my various assortment of lady friends."

"The tales they'd have to tell, I bet," he replies, dimpling again, and with an eager little clap, Kol suddenly leans forward, listening.

"Here we are! Our first customers of the night. I wonder how they'll like the show?"

* * *

"You know," he says silkily one night as they are lolling half-drunken about the Commercial Hotel's lounge, Marcel on his fourth whiskey, he on his twelfth bourbon. "You don't need to wait for Kol. I could change you."

"And you would do that."

"I would."

"I don't have to sleep with you or anything, now do I?"

He leans back in his chair. "Do you know how old I am, Marcel?"

"A little over nine hundred, Kol told me once."

"Correct. So imagine what I've learned in all that time. You wouldn't regret it."

"I think more than a few of your partners would probably argue that."

He spreads his hands. "I can't help my intolerance for disappointment. But, no. This isn't an exchange of favors. I merely want to ask a question."

The human darts his tongue out to taste his lips. "You know, Klaus, somehow I don't think it's quite that easy."

"Oh but it is, I assure you. And all I ask in return is an honest answer."

What must Lucifer, if such a creature exists, feel when he makes his little deals- this pleasurable tightening of the stomach, this little anticipatory frothing of the gut, the pounding heart, accelerated breath- the _smile _that caresses his lips erotically as a lover?

He gets up with his drink in hand.

He walks round behind the boy's chair, sets his free hand down on the back, leans over to rest his chin on Marcel's shoulder.

"You're a twisted little thing, aren't you. You're so desperate to no longer be knocked about, to be looked down upon, that you would bind yourself to an eternity of what Kol and I have given you a mere taste of. Isn't that right," he whispers.

He watches Marcel's fingers tighten on his glass, his shoulders tense, his throat hitch. "That your question, Klaus?"

"No."

He trails his hand across Marcel's back to drape it across the other shoulder, shifts his lips to his opposite ear. "I want to tell you a little story, Marcel. You're no worse than the next man, yes? Not all sinner, nor entirely saint. Just a person. Just a man, trying to get by with a little luck and his saxophone." He turns his nose into the man's carotid, closes his eyes briefly, flicks them back open. "Just like a boy called Niklaus. A very quiet boy, a shy little thing, who had only to endure his father's constant abuse and somehow carry on. He liked horses. He was nice to his sister." He pauses at this last, and he closes his eyes once more, and how his heart still _squeezes_, thinking of this long-absent sister who slipped herself through his fingers so very long ago and never bothered to seek him out again. "But deep down, he was angry all the time. Just like you, mate. But still, he rarely raised his voice, he was never intentionally cruel, he always tried to help. He just wanted to be _accepted_."

He pulls back now, takes another sip, sets down his glass, brings both his hands to the boy's rigid shoulders. "You think that you're going to retain who you are, don't you. You think that all your morals, your principles, your esteem for human life- you think you can _keep _all that, don't you? You just want to be respected, to never not be pushed around again; you would _never _use your power as others have used their own against you." He leans in even closer, drops his voice a little lower. "But do you know, Marcel, perhaps a thousand years from now, perhaps in only a century, a decade, you will become what you hate most."

He jerks the boy's chair suddenly from beneath the table, yanks him out of it by the collar.

Marcel's glass scatters a thousand new constellations across the floor.

"Because it's _intoxicating_." He presses his chest right to the boy's back, leaning his hands forward onto the edge of the table so that Marcel is trapped between his arms, the boy positively a _statue_: do you see, mate, this is precisely what's he's _talking _about, this domination, this flinching cowardice stirred in the strongest of men- what an _elixir _it is.

You never get used to it.

"Imagine yourself in forty years, ninety, a hundred and fifty. The same face. The same young arms, legs, a back that will never hunch. But you've _seen _things, mate. Cities fallen, civilizations overturned, war after war after war. And now all your petty little principles don't matter; they've been ground to dust, just like those cities. Life is transitory, men are insignificant. You don't _care _anymore. You have sampled every sin, every vice, every pleasure, every horror. All of your humanity has been stomped down, snuffed out. Nothing matters anymore, except your strength, your speed, your _superiority_."

He crowds him harder into the table. "And now, my question to you, Marcel, is do you still want it?"

There is an eternity of silence between them, loud as the rumbling of the battlefield with its clattering carts and shrieking horses and howling soldiers.

"Yes," the boy spits out.

He opens his wrist in a flash, whips one arm up to clamp it round the boy's waist, jerks back his head, pries open his mouth, forces his bleeding arm to these lips that open with a gasp to admit him.

A sputtering, a heaving of the throat, a whiplash of the spine, flailing legs, thrashing arms-

And then the first tentative sip.

The delving of the tongue into the wound.

"That's it," he whispers, brushing the boy's ear with his fangs, the hand at Marcel's waist convulsing, digging down into cloth as the human begins to pull harder, his lips moving, his tongue flicking, one hand coming up to tremulously touch his wrist now, fingers cold, hesitant, _fearful_. "There we are. Just a little more, mate." Just precisely like that, with your teeth tentatively testing, your lips rough against him, your tongue warm inside him.

He strangles him slowly, his cheek to the boy's, his eyes flickering, his breathing ragged.

He drops him in a little pile just beyond the table, wiping his mouth as he looks down.

"Fantastic. I think you'll do nicely."

* * *

**New Orleans, 2013**

She wakes to the dipping of the bed beneath weight that is not her own, and snaps open her eyes.

"You're back," she whispers.

He crawls carefully forward onto the mattress, all the way up the rumpled covers to the pillow beside her own. "I was trying not to wake you. What are you doing still in your jacket?"

"I'm going to take that comment as a disappointed 'you're not naked- why aren't you naked' perv observation."

He smiles. "I didn't say that. It's just rather customary for people to remove their jackets before bed. Unless this is some new trend I'm a bit behind on."

She coughs the sleep from her voice, curls a little more in on herself, lets this gray fog that has not quite lifted its shroud from her cotton-swab brain drift down over her too-heavy eyes. "I was just waiting up for you, to chew you out for ratting me out to your _boyfriend_, and then I was going to head back to my hotel. I mean, as long as everything's settled down."

"It's quiet."

"Ok, then. I should probably go."

She sits up with an oh-God-that-is-the-_spot _orgasm of a back pop, and a blink clears this fog from her eyes and all the gauzy layers of this dark foot between them, and now with a frown she brings her knees in toward her chest to drape her arms over the caps and she gives him her little ok-spill head tilt, blinking down at him. "What's wrong?"

"What do you mean?"

"I _mean_, 'what's wrong'? Sorry, I don't know what it is in ye olde British. 'Wherefore art thou knickers up your arse'?"

He looks down with a little laugh, but it's habitual, not heartfelt, it does not wet the eyes, burn the throat, rumble up from the stomach into the chest: it is a rehearsed thing, a covering-up and not a letting go, and what the hell prompts her to do it she does not know, but suddenly she reaches out with her fingers, and she carefully touches the edge of his hairline, skating her fingers in this bare ghost-brush of a thing from one side to the other.

He stares up at her like he always does, like this is the first time he's been touched in years, like he does not understand but he _wants _to, like this one blonde baby vamp no one ever wanted enough is the only thing he will ever ask for in his entire eternal life.

* * *

Caroline-

His brother-

Certainly Kol tried his temper, broke his things, conspired, poked, _infuriated _him in so many myriad _bloody _ways, but this night of deals struck, reminisces begun…these are not the things he remembers, Caroline.

What a burr is younger sibling. You wouldn't understand of course, love, but the gnat _persistence _of them, round and round they go, too quick for a swat, repelled by neither tongue nor lash, circling always back around with this insect perseverance-

And yet-

And yet they-

They should never be _alone_; 'younger'- they bear this title only because one has come before, because in this hierarchy called 'family' someone stands further up the rung, because though they have not been granted the divinity that is mother, father, still they are supposed to always _protect_-

But Kol-

Brother-

You went so _quickly_.

For a thousand years, he shaped himself into something without equal.

And then he stood impotently upon that step and he watched you die not the impermanent death he laid you down to sleep away in your silk-lined bed, but this forever thing of twisted Egyptian ash, stinking, crackling, smoldering on for two endless days.

"Did…everything go ok with Marcel?"

"Yes. We've come to a little agreement."

She drops her hand.

"Caroline," he blurts out.

She lifts an eyebrow.

To demand, bully, maneuver- all of these things he comprehends.

But to _ask_-

How precisely does this go, he begs of the boy he buried long ago, this maggot-eaten ruin she unearths bit by bit by bit.

"Yeah?"

He wets his lips.

He tilts his head.

He scrubs one hand down over his stubble and he looks away with a little frustrated half-sigh of a thing, and what a _thing_, to be abandoned by a vocabulary of a thousand years, to not have at his disposal one faint s'il vous plaît, a single raspy per favore, half an insignificant men fadlek.

"Kol was…a friend of Marcel's…back in the early 20th century. We sort of…ran rampant round this town. We spent a bit of our negotiations reminiscing."

"Oh," she says.

"You know what," she says.

"I'm actually really tired. Maybe I should just crash here for the rest of the night."

* * *

The _look _on his face, when she casually plumps this pillow behind her and she flops back against its perfectly-shaped mound, hair fanning out, coat flapping down.

It's funny, how tentatively this man moves, how a thousand years has honed his strut but never touched his tiptoe, how he can crush a man's skull with no bat of his eye but to slide himself up against a girl, to put his chin to her shoulder, his hand to her hip-

It takes him for-freaking-_ever_, to coordinate this cautious inch-by-inch embrace.

* * *

He tucks himself away in the dustiest of the unused rooms in this bleeding fuckin' behemoth of a parasite nest, and he settles down to wait.

You best hope this little dampening spell of yours keeps up, witches of New Orleans.

He's got himself an Original to notch into his belt.

* * *

**A/N: The 'Handcuff King' is a reference to Houdini. I found a picture of him on a wharf in New Orleans in 1907, talking with a man having his shoes shined. I don't technically know if he performed there, but during this time period he performed all over the United States, so I feel it was probably a pretty safe bet he worked the crowds a bit while he was there. Also, if you want to have an idea of how Klaus 'redecorated' that brothel, look up 'The Ratcliff Highway murders'. But not if you'll be going to bed anytime soon. And 'Storyville' is the name of the red-light district that popped up in the late 19th century and survived until 1917. Rather idyllic name for a place like that, but it was named after the alderman who wrote the legislation that created it.**

**All of the foreign words Klaus uses while he is trying (In his own excessively awkward way) to ask for a little comfort mean 'please'. The first two are probably obvious, but the third is Arabic (or so the internet tells me) and probably not as easily recognized. (Although for all I know you're all fluent in it.)**

**Klaus saving Marcel from slavery is ridiculous. I want to explore a dynamic wherein Marcel is so hungry for power after being treated as a second-class citizen that he would be willing to jump through any hoops put forth by these horrible men, who try their best to shake him up, to see him crumble. I think he's sure he'll only use this newfound power to protect himself, but as Klaus was basically saying, absolute power corrupts absolutely. We'll see Klaus as his mentor as this very extended flashback continues, and I also want to really delve into the relationship between Klaus and Kol, and the disintegration of it that leads to Kol's daggering. I will be tackling Kol's perspective as well in the next flashback.**

**And you bet your sweet ass I made the turning of Marcel a little porny. Klaus is a twist. You know he's probably pitched a tent or two while strangling someone to death.**

**Anyway, thank you so much for all your support, and for not giving up on this series just because I'm a dork for history who doesn't allow Klaus and Caroline to bang nearly as much as they should. Ah well. We've still plenty of story to go; lots of time for sweaty lovetime later.**


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